A Bookish Passage from the Booker Winner

A description of the narrator’s girlfriend’s bookshelf:

Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form.  Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes.  There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle.  I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own.  Further, they seemed to be an organic continuation of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending

I think it might be the most honest passage in the book.  Certainly the most reliable characterization of Veronica.  Anyone with the good sense to choose I Capture the Castle as her comfort read can’t be as mad as her boyfriend makes her out to be.