Book lovers are secret lepidopterists, haunted by the fear that something beautiful and rare might slip their nets. We collect people as much as we collect books, looking for guides more than mentors, and these are elusive: fellow readers who will magically bring essential, gripping, great reads into your life, who intuit your tastes, but who can also persuade you to read outside the narrow circle of your own interests.
My parents were excellent guides when we were growing up; my mother is a natural collector of stories, both the paper variety and the as-told-to kind, and my father is a compulsive book-buyer with eclectic but very particular tastes. One believes that you couldn't have too many stories stored in your memory; the other believes equally firmly that there is no such thing as a house with "too many books". The antidote to growing up and leaving home was to find a partner whose family was equally mad about books and reading, which I managed to do.
It isn't that hard to find fellow bibliophiles who'll share fiction recommendations with you, but non-fiction has always been a much tougher browsing ground. Most of us read fiction with a broad sweep, happy to travel between genres and eras; but except for the most widely inquiring of readers, we're trapped by our own tastes in the area of non-fiction.
It comes as little surprise to realise that the two prizes whose shortlists have brought the most pleasure over the last few years are not fiction prizes: the Aventis rewards the best of science writing, the Samuel Johnson aims to cover the best non-fiction published in the United Kingdom in any given year. The winner of the Samuel Johnson prize was announced on Monday, and going through the shortlists over the years was an exercise in remembered pleasures.
This year's winner, The Pike, is a compelling portrait of the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose flirtation with fascism and failed city-state paved the way for Mussolini. D'Annunzio had that combination of charisma and moral repulsiveness that often marks contemporary fascist leaders, in India as much as in Europe, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett makes this biography a persuasive, if sometimes chilling, read.
Asked to write about herself and the book before the prize was announced, Ms Hughes-Hallett offered a blogpost in the style of D'Annunzio instead: "Some favourite things: War; The scent of oranges; The slithery feel of a greyhound's coat; The way his lover Eleonora Duse wiped her tears upwards onto her temples when he made her cry; Rain falling on violets; Cocaine."
He was a formidably skilled lover, which made up for his greenish teeth and lack of eyelashes; as his lovers discovered, he had as great a talent for casual cruelty as he did for seduction. A small, but telling, detail: he took to wearing a Franciscan habit, to underline his admiration for St Francis, but he wore a mauve silk shift underneath, so that the rough wool would not scourge his flesh.
The Pike and Ms Hughes-Hallett deserve the prize; but one of the joys of this non-fiction prize is that the shortlisted books are almost always exceptionally good.
This year's shortlist includes William Dalrymple's Return of a King, where he drew from Afghan archives and Shah Shuja's own memoirs to create this swashbuckling history, glittering with unforgettable, vividly drawn characters. Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky goes back into Britain's past, blending travelogue with a sharp discarding of old myths. Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher is definitive and elegant.
David Crane's Empires of the Dead is both a brilliant look at the Imperial War Graves commission, and a disquieting inquiry into the uses and politics of memorials, the ways in which they reshape our understanding of history. And David Goulson's A Sting in the Tale was one of the most surprising and eye-opening books to be written, holding its own in an age of seriously good science writing. From the problem of insect mini-holocausts to the closet feminism of bees, where it pays to help your mother bring up your sisters, Mr Goulson writes with infectious passion.
Mary Beard, one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson prize, asked: "How do you judge [say] a big book, on a "big" historical theme, wearing a strong and serious thesis on its sleeve, versus an elegant slim volume whose aim is to spotlight some usually taken-for-granted aspect of the world and help us to see it differently - and perhaps not take it for granted any more?"
But of all the literary prizes cluttering the landscape, the Samuel Johnson prize is probably the one where being on the shortlist is honour enough in itself. The Pike is riveting, and so are many of the other books on the list. In past years, the list of books that were shortlisted but didn't win included Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, Matt Ridley's Genome, Ian Kershaw's Hitler, Liaquat Ahmed's The Lords of Finance, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire.
Samuel Johnson placed curiosity ahead of erudition: "the first passion and the last." The list of authors honoured by the prize named after him reads like a contemporary history of human curiosity; Johnson would have approved.
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