“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL COX Going full Celt VOICING ...

THE MARK OF A GREAT, TOUGH BOOK MAY NOT be how many literature classes it’s taught in but how many film or TV adaptations you can drape on its branches without breaking them. Dramatizations are tricky

From voyages to battles, gods to monsters, heroics to cowardice, the Viking sagas explore all of these themes in magnificent detail

Michael D. C. Drout The Tower and the Ruin J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation 384pp. Norton. £25. Giuseppe Pezzini Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation 456pp. Cambridge University Press. £30. Michael