My earliest reading memory
Unfortunately my memory for this kind of thing is a complete blank, so I’ve decided to manufacture an incident where my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow had to be confiscated from me at preschool because I was having too many insights about it.
My favourite book growing up
I devoured The Colour of Magic and at least 20 other Terry Pratchett novels as a child and consequently have never got over the feeling that there’s something pretty fundamental missing from nearly all “grown-up” fiction (ie jokes).
The book that changed me as a teenager
We perhaps expect novelists to feel a reverent fascination with human consciousness, how miraculous it is, sacred, ineffable, unique etc. But if you read too much Greg Egan at an impressionable age, all of that gets absolutely napalmed. A book like Permutation City is dangerous (and mind-expanding) stuff.
The writer who changed my mind
I am a leftist by temperament, but Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia starts from first principles to make an incredibly compelling case for an ultra-minimal state. It didn’t convert me, but now any time I’m tempted to dismiss a political opinion out of hand, I remember Nozick and tell myself: “Don’t just blithely assume you’re on firmer intellectual ground than the other side.”
The book that made me want to be a writer
I can’t remember a time before I wanted to be a writer, but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon was the book that crystallised what kind of writer I wanted to be. Unfortunately I am now about the age Chabon was when he wrote it, and I definitely can’t do any of the things he did in it, so this gives me no pleasure to recollect.
The book or author I came back to
Studying Emma for AS English put me off Jane Austen for 20 years. During lockdown I finally read Pride and Prejudice and realised: “Oh right, yes, this woman is an immortal genius. Now I understand what everyone has been on about all this time!” (But I still think it’s counterproductive to force her on grunting teenage boys.)
The book I reread
William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the only book I worshipped when I was 12 that I still worship every bit as much now. I enjoy bringing this up because when I met Gibson he told me he found it very alarming to think of a 12-year-old reading it.
The book I could never read again
As a soft-hearted indie boy I loved The Sun Also Rises, but unfortunately since then I’ve learned more about Ernest Hemingway’s life: not just his bullying of poor F Scott Fitzgerald, but above all the incident in 1937 when he defended the assassination of the Spanish writer José Robles. Impossible now to imagine reading another Hemingway novel about how to be a solid guy.
The book I discovered later in life
In August 2021 I found myself consumed by bitterness, regret, distrust of my friends and loved ones. In other words, my usual mood, except that this time it all had a focus: somehow nobody had ever told me about Mating by Norman Rush.
The book I am currently reading
Being and Becoming may sound like a treatise by some pre-war German phenomenologist but it’s actually the very enjoyable autobiography of Myrna Loy, my favourite actress from the golden age of Hollywood.
My comfort read
Norman Lewis is never less than a balm. I started a few years ago with A Dragon Apparent but he has a very deep back catalogue – so deep I only recently learned that this guy I basically thought of as a cosy English travel writer also wrote a novel about how the CIA hired the Mafia to kill Kennedy.
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