A Voracious Reader

 I must admit that when someone tells me they're a 'voracious reader', always with his or (more commonly) her nose in a book, my heart sinks a little. I know this self-description will nearly always mean that s/he is a compulsive reader of contemporary (or genre) fiction, and that we are unlikely to have more than a couple of titles in common. Here is a description of a 'voracious reader' from a slightly earlier time, one whose identity might come as a surprise: 
'Reading, for which he had a voracious appetite, was his chief relaxation and recreation. He read all the current English and American fiction as it became available from the Harrods Lending Library, most of which must have been by his lights pretty dismal stuff. The only writers he refused to read were Simenon and C.P. Snow. On average, he must have got through about eight books a week and sometimes my mother changed their two library books daily, to the despair of wide-eyed Miss Clutton who manned the exchange desk at the library. The standard of the novels never seemed to matter. I can only remember a few times when he put a book down with the words 'This is utterly bogus – I can't finish it!' ... He only liked novels – he would not read poetry or biography. He loved thrillers and magazines, particularly Time magazine.'
Well, at least he drew the line at C.P. Snow (but why Simenon?). The voracious reader described above, by his son Sebastian, is Henry Yorke, better known as the esteemed novelist Henry Green, author of Living, Loving, Party Going and more. Sadly he seems, from this account, to be a reader who has given up on really reading: as Sebastian notes, 'He never re-read a book or selected one from his small library of 'classics' collected in his Oxford days. Nor can I recall him reading anything by his professed idols: Gogol, Turgenev, Doughty, Céline or Faulkner.'
  The reminiscence is taken from a volume I picked up recently in (where else?) a charity bookshop – Surviving: Stories, Essays, Interviews, an NYRB volume complete with an introduction by John Updike. I thought I'd have a look at it to see if it would make me feel any more warmly towards Green, a novelist whose works have always defeated me, much though I, at some level, admire them for their originality and skill. They somehow leave me cold, perhaps because there is so little warmth in them, or so little humour. This is probably unfair.
  Surviving contains some good stuff in the way of short stories and fragments, with some interesting thoughts on writing. There's a vivid portrait of Edward Garnett, who helped launch Green's career, and a fine essay on C.M. Doughty (Travels in Arabia Deserta), whose prose he hugely admired.  Most of the journalism collected here is routine stuff. For me, the best things in the collection are Green's memories of serving in the Auxiliary Fire Service at the height of the London Blitz, with great swathes of the city on fire, and death and destruction all around: A Rescue is particularly memorable. Overall, I'm afraid this volume left me feeling no more warmly towards the author, who is probably in the end simply 'not for me'. I've tried.