For a number of years after becoming a librarian, I actually didn’t read much. One reason was the amount of time and effort I was expending on learning Scottish Gaelic, and then my changing eyesight after age 40 also put me off. Lately, though, I’ve been reading a lot. Over the past two years, I’ve become intensely, almost obsessively curious about a number of subjects. There are always a dozen books piled up on my desk and next to the sofa. I’ve even been dipping into fiction again, after more than a decade of disinterest.

The first John Murray and the late eighteenth-century book trade, by William Zachs. Over the holidays last December, my efforts to make some progress in family history led to the discovery that my 4x great grandfather was a famous London bookbinder. Famous in some circles, anyway. For a librarian, that’s a pretty big deal. Especially if you originally went to library school with a big interest in rare books. Publishers, printers and booksellers have left some records behind, but bookbinders not so much, except the artifacts themselves. So any books that focus on the late eighteenth century book trade in London are really important for understanding the life and times of my ancestor. This is also one of the most interesting periods in the history of London. John Murray was a Scot who entered the book trade almost randomly. His shop was not far from my ancestor’s shop off The Strand. The lucky thing for historians is that Murray’s archives remained intact, and provide enough material with which to set out his biography and provide a detailed checklist of his business partners and complicated business arrangements throughout Britain.

Defending the faith: nineteenth-century American Jewish writings on Christianity and Jesus, by George L. Berlin. This book is on my sofa at the moment due to one of those odd bits of thought that gets into my brain and, while not occupying too much time, never really goes away. In broad terms my interest is in the question of the Jewish response to the appropriation of their religion and scriptures by another faith that grew much more powerful and dangerous. In the twentieth century, Christians seem to have decided on the whole to respect and support Judaism and Jewish people (never more so than after Hitler and the Holocaust). At the same time, mainstream society remains biased and in many ways disrespectful. Standard library terminology, just to take one example, still denominates the Hebrew scriptures as “The Old Testament, (O.T.)” This book deals with an additional issue: that of Jewish people living in a republic that has struggled since its founding with a difficult question. How much freedom of conscience and belief is its Christian majority willing to tolerate? These questions are still very timely.