Susan Hill had a mountain of books inside her Gloucestershire farmhouse that she had never made time to read. So she spent a year reading nothing but the unread books that filled her shelves.

The result is Howards End Is On the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, published in August by Profile Books. Included in the book is a list of 40 titles that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life,” Hill said.

Among them is one by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.

Hill said she chose Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter “always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3.”

A review of Hill’s book in The Guardian calls the book “a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.”

Read the introduction to Hill’s book.