From The Wall Street Journal:
Who is this guy?
You’re supposed to be able to tell something about a man from looking over his books. But I can’t make this guy out. We are told the owner of the house we have rented in a Swiss village is French and spends only a few weeks a year here. That suggests he is immensely wealthy, but the fact that he finds it convenient to rent out his house suggests that he is not illimitably wealthy. He has good taste: Everything is just so. There isn’t anything in the house—I know I am supposed to call it a “chalet,” but that feels a little precious—to compete with the views of the Alps.
Except the books. A different kind of man might have gone with books-by-the-yard (by the mètre?), hidebound and stately and not intended for reading. But this guy has real books. With the exception of a few French titles, they are almost all in English and evince a deep, curious, respectful and very un-French interest in the minds and doings of les Anglo-Saxons.
He’s not a young man. Here is a midcentury mind: “Caen: Anvil of Victory,” dictators, inflation, Bertrand Russell, psychoanalysis, the Cold War. Two subjects are splendidly overrepresented: diplomacy and its fraternal twin, espionage. If this gentleman has one biography on a subject, he has four of them—a completist and an obsessive with an interest in intelligence, treachery and high affairs of state. There are a half-dozen books by and about Henry Kissinger, as well as biographies of Talleyrand, Lloyd George, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. There are five books about the Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, and a big pile of Graham Greene novels.
. . . .
Fiction is segregated in a loft, with low chairs and a reading lamp in the shape of a St. Bernard dog with a keg of brandy around his neck. (We are near the St. Bernard pass.) There’s middlebrow ephemera (John Grisham) but mostly those wonderful old Penguin paperbacks with the orange covers—a wall of these looks like happiness to me—and you could spend a year contentedly reading through them: “The Dean’s December,” “Wide Sargasso Sea,” “A Writer’s Notebook,” “Friends and Heroes,” “A House for Mr. Biswas” and many more.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal