Taped to the wall above the stairs leading to the basement at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco is a sign saying: “The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity...”, and that quote gives me comfort as I gaze at the pile of books on the little table beside my bed.

A few of them have been there for over a year, some unread, others thoroughly scrutinised, still more leafed through but not yet picked up for some serious reading; those are adventures lying in wait, so to speak, literary encounters of the future. Whether they will turn out to be lover's trysts or dates with boredom remains to be seen.

In no particular order I have been charmed and captivated by ‘Waterlog', by Roger Deakin, a book sent me by my eldest son Andrew who knows and appreciates a good read when he sees one. The book is a travelogue of sorts, a watery quest to search for, find and finally bathe in as many swimming holes as Mr.by Deakin can find around the British Isles, from small streams to large rivers, canals and moats, Deakin dips in all of them, and his descriptions of tracking down forgotten local spots are at once lyrical, poetic and often very funny.

Also sent me by the same son is a new edition - actually a replica - of Alfred Watkins’ ‘The Old Straight Track’, first published at the dawn of the Twentieth century. Alfred points out features of the British landscape that were engineered millennia past, encompassing points of geological curiosity such as hillside notches, standing stones, barrows, springs, and ancient wells, religious sites currently occupied by Christianity but with former pagan associations, and he notes with a certain controlled enthusiasm that they may be linked together by a series of straight lines, or ley lines. The book makes no otherworldly assumptions about the purpose of all these observations - Watkins simply bears witness to the facts. It was a book I fell in love with some fifty years ago and used it to explore much of the English countryside. Walking through and atop so much of southern England’s storied lands, I saw the landscape through newly opened eyes, and have never been the same since. Truly the land trembles and shivers with untold stories, forgotten fables and so often cloaked in mists of mellow and intriguing mysticism.

At a dinner party last year at our house, Britt and I entertained a couple of friends from New York City, plus a writer friend of theirs from San Francisco. His name is Michael Castleman, and one of his many books is a page-turning thriller named ‘Killer Weed’, a story of the pot underworld of a few decades ago. With a foot in the Sixties and the other in the present, it is a ripping yarn and proved impossible to put down until the last page was reached, read and relished.

Once or twice a year, I help out ferrying books for the friends of a local library, taking them from storage to the library, where they are set out on long tables for sale, raising funds for the library. The work is unpaid of course, but the benefits do include grabbing a few books at the end of the day. Two of the treasures I snagged on the last occasion are ‘The European Discovery of America’ by Samuel Eliot Morison and ‘First World War Prose’, a collection of short stories edited by Jon Glover and Jon Silkin. Yep, two Jon’s. Guess it was their destiny to find one another and edit this huge tome. I have, to use a few phrases employed by John Deakin, splashed about a bit in the latter, and taken a few short dips in the former. Both books are Olympian sized pools, to stretch a watery metaphor to breaking point, and thus far I have avoided the interminable laps required to start, and hopefully finish.

Inevitably other interests lie beside me. A small pile of music-related books - ‘Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’ by Jeremy Collingwood, dealing with the recordings produced by the exceedingly eccentric and madly talented Jamaican producer; ‘Echo and Reverb’ by Peter Doyle, a book I bought just before Christmas when shopping for Christmas presents for others. I guiltily admit that this happens every year at Christmas - I go looking for others and then buy for myself. I got as far as about a third of the way into this book, but have found it to be probably the dullest, densest and most completely boring book I have come across in years. I know I will never finish it, and that will be a good thing!

‘Lost Chords’ by Richard Sudhalter is sub-titled ‘White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945’ and is a baffling and challenging work. Sudhalter is a musician. He is also a gloriously poetic and insightful writer, and the book is a joy to read - writing about music is as difficult as writing about scent or smell. There is an oil and water aspect to the task at hand, but Sudhalter manages it successfully, in spades. The thrust of his argument, however, raises an eyebrow or two. To be sure he goes out of his way to praise and laud certain pivotal black pioneers, but his thesis is founded on the supposition that today’s contemporary thinking has unfairly relegated white pioneer jazz musicians to the back of the pack, as it were. As with everything related to jazz, much is indeed subjective, and the period he deals with starts more than one hundred years ago, and therefore there is no-one around from that period to refute or boost his points. From my perspective, his weakness is the lack of space he gives to the blues. Someone once said, ‘the blues lie at the heart of jazz’, and it is an undeniable fact that the blues came from the black population.

Bob Westerman published, a few years ago, ‘The Civilian Jeep model CJ3A’, an exhaustive research into the second civilian model Willys Overland built based on the legend WW2 military vehicle. As I m currently doing a frame-up restoration on a 1951 3A for my wife, this a regular bedtime browse. My goodness, the passenger fender went through a design change at serial number so and so! A mundane fact to most people, but to jeep maniacs, such minutiae set off the passion meter no less than dear old Alfred Watkin’s observations about heel stones and menhirs.

Last but not least, and as a bookend to the beginning of this piece, the last book is ‘Little Boy’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner and founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco. ‘Little Boy’ is his autobiography, and, get this, published on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Yes sirree, he’s still kicking. The book starts off in fairly straight-ahead prose but rapidly evolves into the most magical, adventurous, joyful, playful examination of his life, feelings, attitudes, and the exploration of his forever unfolding word-hoard. He writes like most of us can only dream of writing, and when one comes to the end, finally, all one can do is lay the book aside, lean back and luxuriate in the most wonderfully warm glow of having been entertained, loved and caressed, educated, outraged, astonished and ultimately illuminated.

Thanks, Mr Ferlinghetti. Thanks, that was nice, really, really nice.