Back in the winter of 2011, I sent an email to a Norwegian choreographer who was coming to Birmingham with an intriguing-sounding project, part literature, part installation, part performance. It was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. It involved people committing books to memory and then reciting those books back from memory to other people who would make a one-on-one appointment to listen to them — or, I should more properly say, to read them.

It was a journey that introduced me to some wonderful people and took me to some wonderful European cities across the next seven years — to Islington Library in London as part of Dance Umbrella; to the Bibliothèque Nationale and to an empty shop in the Galerie Ravenstein in Brussels as part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts; to the Myntgata 2 building (a former military barracks) and to the outdoor sculpture garden at Ekebergparken as part of oslobiennalen; to the Bibliotheek Kortrijk as part of NEXT Arts Festival; and to the Kaiku–Kieku–Stidilä nightclub (complete with its own sauna) in Helsinki as part of Today Is Our Tomorrow / PUBLICS.

The book I chose to start learning was J G Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash. The text below is something I wrote to help promote the Birmingham dates back in May 2012. Working on this project has been one of the greatest personal and professional pleasures of my life.

I am indebted to Mette Edvardsen for her willingness to trust some random stranger who asked if she needed any locals to take part. Perhaps there was some cosmic force pulling us together: it later turned out that she and I share the same birthday.

I saw Francois Truffaut’s film version of Fahrenheit 451 long before I ever read Ray Bradbury’s novel. In the context of this book-championing project, that’s probably something to be shamefaced about. Or maybe not. Bradbury demonstrates that a book is more than a text written on a sheaf of pages. A book is ideas and feelings articulated in a carefully crafted sequence of words. And Bradbury’s Book People commit their books to their memories so that those ideas and feelings survive even after the paper they are printed on has been incinerated.

This far into THFAITAS*, I see a parallel there. Day by day, our books of paper and ink are being steadily transformed into books of flesh and blood. The pages of sentences and paragraphs and chapters are now becoming embedded in our brains and our voices and our memories. When a reader sits down with us, they genuinely will be reading us as much as they are reading the text we have learned.

Their unique experience of the book is formed by the precise detail of how we remember our text during that particular session. There will be moments when whole stretches will pour out as if the words had a life of their own. But there will inevitably be moments when we stumble or falter — when we forget a word or a line and there is a brief or a not-so-brief pause as we try to pick up the thread again. These moments are typographic errors in the texts we are busy imprinting in our heads. But unlike a printed page, we have the power to correct ourselves with a smile.

During our rehearsals, I’ve had the privilege to read and to be read by both Mette* and Kristien*, and in both directions, it’s an experience like nothing else I can describe. The readings took place on early evenings in the cavernous foyer of Symphony Hall, surrounded by a constant stream of human traffic, on their way to concerts or on their way home from work. And each time, for half an hour, two people shared something quite simple, a story recounted by one to the other, a little island of calm and concentration in the midst of a very public space in the centre of a massive city.

Reader and book make and break eye contact, adjusting positions every now and then to get more comfortable, and very gently, the story unfolds. So absorbing is this experience that it has a curiously magnetic effect on people around. They pause their own conversations to gauge what is being said by the book to the reader; they shift their chairs to spy and eavesdrop on the person who doesn’t stop talking and the one who does not talk at all. The urge to listen is hard to resist. On behalf of all eight books who form part of Birmingham’s THFAITAS library, I hope you’ll surrender to that urge. Come and read us. Don’t leave us on our shelves.

*1 — The acronym for the project: Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine
*2 — Mette Edvardsen, project leader, who was learning I Am A Cat by Natsume Sōseki, translated into English by Iko Aito
*3 — Kristien Van den Brande, who was learning Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville