My earliest reading memory
Harry by the Sea by Gene Zion. My mum taught me to read with this fine tale of a wee dog’s adventures by the shore. We’d sit in the armchair by the window of our tiny flat in Irvine, Ayrshire. I’d have been three at the time, making it 1969.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 17 when I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in the summer of 1983. I picked it up in the school library one day and it was the first time I laughed out loud reading a novel. I remember being stunned to find out it had been published years before I was even born. An early intimation of what books could do over time and distance.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Again, this was randomly picking something off the shelf, this time on the eighth floor of Glasgow University Library, when I was in the first year of my English literature degree. The book was Money by Martin Amis. I’d heard of him but had never read anything by him. This was his latest novel, just published – every sentence was this pyrotechnic display. Like Amis when he first read Saul Bellow, I knew that I’d need to read everything he’d written. And it was the first time I seriously thought, “God, I’d really like to try to do something like this.”
The books I came back to
The Rabbit novels by John Updike, which were a trilogy at the time I attempted them, in my early 20s. I read the first book, Rabbit, Run and wasn’t really minded to go on with the other two. I tried again maybe a decade later, by which time there were four books and I realised that they got progressively better. Well, almost. I think the third book, Rabbit Is Rich, is the best. Just flawless. Stupidly, I reread it on holiday in France just after I’d finished writing my first novel and I was of a mind to throw my own manuscript on the fire.
The book I reread
There are several – much of Amis. The Rabbit quartet I just mentioned. Lolita and Pnin by Nabokov. In fact, as Nabokov said, “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Angela Carter’s Wise Children is also a novel I’ve returned to a few times.
The book I could never read again
I wouldn’t say “never”, but I recently tried to reread John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which was a book I loved in my 20s, and found I couldn’t really get along with it.
The book I am currently reading
Graeme Johnston’s Kerby, a collection of biographical stories about growing up in Ayrshire in the 1990s, which is making me very happy.
My comfort read
This is going to sound really weird, because we couldn’t be further apart politically, but all three volumes of Alan Clark’s diaries. I just love the sense of falling into the sweep of an entire life, with all its hopes, dreams and thwarted ambitions. As with any good tragedy, every time I open them I think something hopeful, like: “Maybe this time he won’t get brain cancer in the end.”
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