I wish I had thought of it but the term comes from a book I have been reading, HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN`T READ by Pierre Bayard - and yes, I have read it. The title makes it sound like one of those How to Bluff  books but it is far more serious and scholarly, while being extremely readable and making a lot of sense.

'We might use the term 'inner library' to characterize that set of books around which every personality is constructed and which then shapes each person`s individual relationship to books and to other people.'

It is a complex argument and adds up to at least what Francis Spufford was talking about in his delightful memoir 'The Boy That Books Built.'

Clearly I am more than the sum of the books I have read - (though am I more than the sum of the books I have written ?  ) -but the books which have affected me deeply, which I have read and re-read, whole paragraphs of which I know by heart, whose scenes are part of my inner landscape will surely have gone a long way towards forming my imagination and even my character and personality. Would I be the same person if Alice in Wonderland, The Mayor of Casterbridge, To the Lighthouse, The Quiet American, Bleak House, Little Dorritt et al had not become so much part of me ? I don`t know.  I think Bayard takes the argument too far when he says 'we are the sum of our inner libraries' for that implies these are all we are and I do not believe that to be true.

What I am certain IS true is this.

'It is far from evident, despite what you would expect, the writer is in the best position either to speak about his book or to remember it precisely... after we write a text and are separated from it, we may be as far from it as others are.'   Or indeed, more so, as time goes by. This is something I am always trying to make students understand. They are intimate with the book of mine they are studying now, I wrote it long ago and have long forgotten much about it. They bring to it a world of experience that I did not, their reading and the context in which they are reading, change the book I wrote. A text is a living thing, not fixed and static, it changes according to the way it is read, readers bring a different perspective to it every time. Think only of the way a character may look. My Heathcliff , my Mrs Dalloway, is not yours, nor does the character I described in a novel I wrote bear much resemblance to the one you see in your  mind when you read my book. But it is a hard job getting readers, whether students studying for exams or members of book groups, to see that they affect the text, that the text changes, that the author does not have 'the answers'.

I recommend Pierre Bayard`s book. It may surprise you.