My earliest reading memory
I’ve never really recovered from the emotional battering meted out by EB White’s Charlotte’s Web. Yes, of course the death of Charlotte was horribly sad, but far worse in my opinion was the moment when, during Wilbur the Pig’s hour of greatest need, the girl who owned him decided she’d rather go on the ferris wheel with Henry Fussy. She had a pig of her very own and she preferred the company of a boy? I was beside myself with rage and disbelief.
My favourite book growing up
Waking at dawn on a camping holiday in Wales, rain pattering on the canvas, I reached for my still-sleeping sister’s book. My Family and Other Animals grabbed me in a bear hug from the very first line; I read it all that day, even when walking across the thistles to the terrible loos. I was 10, I loved books that made me laugh, and it gave me a template for perfectly formed comedy as well as a dream world of sunlight and freedom.
The book that made me want to be a writer
When I’d just started secondary school my mother suggested I might enjoy the bit in Down and Out in Paris and London where George Orwell works in a restaurant. And I did – in fact, I found it unputdownable, and I went on to read everything he had written. I’d found a “grown-up” author I could fully understand, his prose as clear – in Orwell’s own words – as a window pane. His style became the distant pinnacle I aimed for.
The book I came back to
After wading through the early chapters a couple of times, my third attempt at Middlemarch – I was in my 30s by then – was like stepping on to a raft: suddenly, effortlessly, the whole world was flowing past. Eliot sees everything; the moment at which she tilts the prism through which we’re viewing Casaubon, and allows us a glimpse into his cramped and frightened soul, is perhaps my most intense reading memory – a lesson in how to write and in how not to presume that we ever really know one another.
The book I could never read again
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is an exquisite novel of loneliness, of tentative happiness and chosen family, but it is also so emotionally painful that I could never read it again – I’d neither want to relive that pain, nor to feel the impact of it blunted by familiarity.
What I’m reading now
I read a lot of nonfiction and particularly relish gruelling tales of travel and exploration in which inadequately prepared travellers drop their only pair of gloves into a crevasse or unwisely decide to eat polar bear liver, etc. Along these lines, I’ve just finished novelist and sailor David Vann’s A Mile Down, the true account of what happened when the author paid a lot of money to have an ocean-going yacht built and it turned out to be a deeply dangerous dud. Riveting.
My comfort read
Whenever I dip into The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, it’s like having a conversation with my mother, who reread it every year. The story of gentle, lumpen Quoyle (“a great damp loaf” of a man), struggling to rebuild his life by moving to Newfoundland, the home of his ancestors, is actually a skein of stories, rich with character, moving, vivid and often very funny. It’s everything I want out of a book; it’s everything I try to put into a book.
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