Sunday Shelfie with Leah McLaren

Welcome to another Sunday Shelfie, our rummage through the bookshelves of authors and always fertile ground for book recommendations.

If you would like to catch up with other authors who have graced this Sunday Shelfie series then you can do so by clicking just here.

But let’s see who I have for you this week…

Leah McLaren

is an award-winning journalist and the author of both fiction and non-fiction, including her memoir, Where You End And I Begin.

You can also find her excellent Substack, Juvenescence, here:

Plus she also has another Substack, The White Room, where she uses her hypnotherapy skills to guide you through audio meditations:

But, what we’re all here for is a poke around her bookcases, right? So let’s see what Leah’s got there:

How would you describe your collection of books? Any favourite genres?

About 50% of the books I own are fiction, so I have a clear preference. Presumably it’s because I studied English literature and now write fiction. Apart from that my library is really all over the map. Lots of narrative non-fiction, biography, memoir (I’ve published one of those too). Interestingly, I have TWO ENTIRE SHELVES of books about London and Britain, mostly cultural/social histories. This surprised me when I reorganised my books a year or so ago but on reflection it makes sense. I’m now a naturalised Canadian-British dual citizen, the ex-wife of an Englishman and the mother of two very English boys. I thought they’d both turn out like Harry Potter but they speak like all their peers – in a kind of Jamaican/Ghanian/South Asian-inflected cockney patois called London multicultural English. ‘Allow it, Mum!’ I’ve lived in London now for almost 20 years and one of things I love about it is how unfathomable it still is to me in many ways. I am naturally quite restless and prone to boredom, and trying to comprehend the complexities of Britain, and specifically England and Englishness is like a never-ending project I will never tire or hope to complete. I also have quite a lot of poetry but you wouldn’t know because it takes up so little space.

How many books do you estimate you have and how are they organised, if at all?

Okay, I just counted and it’s in the range of 2000. And that’s roughly half of what it used to be before I separated from the boys’ father three years ago. It’s good that we broke up because he was a huge reader and collector of books and I used to say to him, ‘You know we are going to die one day under a collapsed bookshelf, and the cat will eat our faces, right?’ So catastrophe averted, phew!

My ordering system, which I wrote about in detail on my Substack Juvenescence a couple of years ago, is less like a library dewy decimal system and more like a bookshop’s. So first, broadly by category (fiction/non-fiction being the two main ones), then by subcategory (poetries, short stories/biography, psychology, etc), then within those subcategories, alphabetically by author – with the exception of certain subject-types of which there happens to be a preponderance (so in non-fiction for instance: London/Britain, sex, art, film, travel, etc.). I’m not hugely scientific or anal about it, I just want to be able to know roughly where to look if I want to find a specific volume. There are piles of books everywhere in the house, which I’m quite used to. Every couple of months I go around and collect them all up and put them back on the shelves according to my idiosyncratic system – I keep a map of it written in one of my indexed bullet journals, so I don’t forget how it works.

In percentage terms, how many of the total books on your shelves have you read?

Hopefully half, maybe two thirds at a stretch… but in truth, probably just over half. Certainly nowhere near three quarters. Reason being: I was a broadsheet journalist for a long time in the days when publicists still sent out paper books as opposed to ebooks. And because of my Substack and blurbs or whatever, I still get the odd one in the post from time to time. And I buy a lot and get given a lot. I have a system for spillover, btw – here’s a tip: keep space on every shelf by using pretty objects! I collect antique book stops because my library is always expanding and contracting (mostly the latter).

When I reorganised my bookshelves a couple of years ago (sorry to keep going on about it, but honestly it was an ENORMOUS project, I had no idea – I thought it would take a couple of days and it was over a week of straight work!), I threw out and/or gave away a lot of books I’d read or half-read and didn’t much care for and gave away all the books I knew I’d never read and made sure to keep the ones I read and loved and thought might be worth returning to, or that my children might read and of course the ones I wanted to read but hadn’t yet gotten around to… The result is that my library is full of stuff I either want to read or might re-read or try (and probably fail) to get my children or friends to read, which makes it very exciting. A bit like a very nostalgic second hand book shop I can shop for in for free anytime I want.

Which three books are top of your TBR (To Be Read) pile at the moment?

1. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs by Robert Kanigel (very excited, just published, meant to be brilliant, am re-reading her masterpiece also The Death and Life of American Cities)

2. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (I bought this novel then gave up like a wimp because it’s about chronic illness and I’m a bit squeamish but it just won the Pen/Faulkner this week, and I loved his first one and also his Substack essays so I’m determined to give it another go)

3. Connected Parenting by Jennifer Kolari (I have an aversion to parenting books and self-help of any kind, but a wise friend I trust recommended it, so… can’t say I want to, but it is on the pile)

Which book on your bookshelf is the most well-thumbed/do you return to the most, and why?

I go back to Janet Malcom’s The Journalist and the Murderer quite often. I think it’s something about the clarity of her voice and the uncategorisable nature of the subject matter? I don’t know.

Which book on your bookshelf do you most often buy as a gift for others, and why?

Most recently it’s been Suzie Boyt’s slender, heart-wrenching novel Missed and Loved. It’s about a single mother in contemporary North London whose teenage daughter becomes a heroin addict then a mother herself, and how this plays out in their little family. It’s not actually about addiction so much as how love and secrets are passed between generations of women. Not depressing at all! Twice in the past year I’ve given away my own copy to a good friend I knew would truly appreciate it and bought a replacement – does that count as a gift?

If you have a collection of writing craft books, which is your favourite and why?

Don’t really go in for those, but I did read Mary Karr’s The Art of the Memoir while I was writing my own and enjoyed it very much.

If you write within a particular genre, can you tell us your three favourite books within that genre (classic or contemporary) and why?

I wish I did but I don’t!

Which book on your bookshelf is your guilty pleasure?

Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a collection of utterly filthy and amoral women’s sexual fantasies from the 70s. Hair curling by 2025 standards (the ‘rape’ section is just the tip of the iceberg), obviously it would never get published now but was a huge number one bestseller at the time and marketed as a high brow sociological feminist text. Not sure about that but it’s definitely more erotic than PornHub.

Which book on your bookshelf do you feel most guilty for not having read yet, and why?

Bleak House by Dickens. I keep trying but I just run out of steam a couple of hundred pages in. Also various books published by acquaintances over the years which I have dutifully bought and then… DEVOURED AND ABSOLUTELY BLOODY LOVED! (obviously)

Which book would we be most surprised to find on your bookshelf?

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. A cynical pulp recast of The Prince which a friend in LA gave to me as a gift years ago in the hope I’d learn to harness and achieve my hidden potential and ambition. I keep trying to get rid of it but it surprises me by turning up again on my shelf, like a curse.

Which book on your shelf would you take to a desert island, and why?

The Norton Collection of Modern Poetry, which I’ve had since undergrad. But only if I could buy a new hardcover copy first though because mine’s ragged and would fall apart instantly.

Which book is on your wishlist currently to join all the others on your bookshelf?

Nothing. If I want it, I’ll have it.

• Thank you so much

Leah McLaren

for taking part in today’s Sunday Shelfie.

If there is an author that you would like to see here, do tag them in the comments or a restack.

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