My earliest reading memory
My father reads the poems of Ogden Nash. He enjoyed silliness and I enjoyed anything he found funny, and so they have stayed alive since early childhood, unlike anything I had to learn by heart later in school. At six I learned: “Sweets are great, but alcohol is quicker”. Good advice, even if it came a little early.
My favorite book as a child
Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I also longed to be alone on my own island, with only my ingenuity and a wild wolf for company. It made my childhood seem not a time of powerlessness, but a time of competence and courage.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights had a strange effect on my romantic expectations as a young teenager, and it took me a while to recover from it.
The book that made me want to become a writer
I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since I became aware of my imagination, but when I read AS Byatt’s Frederica Quartet at 20, I was electrified. She described a lemon in a bowl of plums, and that image hangs in my mind like a painting. I read Still Life and thought I want to create beauty just like that.
The book I came back to
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I tried too soon and failed. Then I moved to New York and listened to Lyndam Gregory’s incredible audio recording and walked and walked, mesmerized. I walked all over Manhattan just to live in that book and now I have the strongest synesthesia; I can tell you where I was standing on the High Line when Rushdie first described the locust-green chutney; I know which bodega I bought Swedish Fish from when Saleem Senai discovered the truth about his identity.
The book I re-read
Middlemarch by George Eliot is almost an obsession for me. I read it for the first time only three years ago and I think I’ve re-read it seven or eight times since then. It would be my desert island book without hesitation – I’d take a town and a world with me.
The book I could never read again
The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. Not because I didn’t like them – quite the opposite. It was because I read them with such passionate intensity that I Was Patrick Melrose, completely taken by the experience and the novels themselves. It was just before Christmas, I was alone and felt like I was just devouring one novel after another. I still remember calling my old bookshop just before closing time and begging them to give me the next novel. immediately. The bookseller took payment over the phone and hid the volume under a bench for me on the way home. It felt like a drug deal, and that was fitting. These books and this immersion in them are now so ingrained in me that I never need to go back.
The book I am currently reading
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Its meditative beauty is a tonic after the brilliant and painful body slam of Miranda July’s All Fours that I just finished. It’s sleek and I’m taking my time with it – rocking weightlessly, tending to my dwarf wheat experiments, watching the steady progress of a typhoon, looking back at distant Earth with love and longing.
My feel-good reading
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Many of my favourite books are series, because I’m a homebody and when I get to somewhere I enjoy, I want to move in. When I’m overtired or feeling under the weather, I pick up The Light Years or Marking Time and imagine myself spearing raspberries and holding the Duchy’s basket, or drinking a generous Gin and It and gossiping with Villy and Sybil. I’ve read these books so many times that they’ve become memories of me; I’m convinced they all happened to me.
