My earliest reading memory
The first novel I remember reading was called My Side of the Mountain. I’m not sure how old I was. Maybe nine. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I had to look the book up to make sure that it actually exists, that I didn’t just dream it. It does exist, and it’s easy to understand why I liked it so much. It presents a vision of idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously spoke to something in me at the time.
The book that made me want to be a writer
It’s hard to answer this question because it implies some kind of single “road to Damascus” moment that didn’t happen. Having said that, I remember even today the impact that two short, simple novels had on me when I read them at the age of 11 or 12. They were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and it’s probably at about that time that I started “wanting to be a writer”. I think that the desire to be a writer is essentially the desire to imitate, to recreate the effect that other people’s writing has had on you. In that sense all fiction is fan fiction.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The power of books to change people is probably overstated, but certainly my view of what literature was, of what it meant to write something, of the relationship between the written word and the world it strives to represent, was shaped, when I was 15 or 16 I suppose, by my reading Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Part social and cultural history, part group portrait, part criticism, part memoir, straying often to the edges of philosophy, shot through with a kind of sadness, it left a profound impression on my adolescent self.
The book or author I came back to
All fired up about modernist literature, I turned, naturally enough, to James Joyce’s Ulysses. I was encouraged in this by a sympathetic English teacher. I think I read it over the holidays and when school resumed we talked about it. “Did you find it funny?” he asked me. I found the question odd. The fact is, I had completely failed to realise that the book is a comedy. I imagine myself, at the age of 16 or whatever, solemnly reading, say, the passage at the end of the “Sirens” episode in which the music is the sound of Bloom’s flatulence – Pprrpffrrppff – and totally failing to see the joke. Since then I have reread it, more in the spirit, I hope, in which it was written.
The book I discovered later in life
I read As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner for the first time a year or two ago. The device of having chapters offering different points of view on some situation, each one labelled with the name of the character whose perspective we are about to get, has become wearily familiar. In what might be its original iteration, though, it feels fresh and powerful. Particularly when combined with the way Faulkner ventriloquises the rough language of his characters, while giving them a sort of Homeric grandeur in their closeness to the essential experiences of human life. That the novel is about a demographic that has come to seem politically salient in the US (and elsewhere) just adds another dimension of interest to it. Having waited nearly 50 years to discover it, I’ve no doubt I’ll be reading it again soon.
The book I reread
One I have been returning to again and again since I was in my 20s is Samuel Pepys’ Diary. It must be the most moreish book I know. Picking it up to read a single short entry, I can easily get stuck in it for an hour. As fascinating as the differences between our world and the world of the 1660s are the similarities – it’s easy to imagine Pepys having a substantively identical life in modern London. And the man himself? He’s just very human: generous, deceitful, vain, loving, petty, lustful, intelligent, and never anything other than massively engaging in the perfect frankness he brings to his endeavour.
The book I am currently reading
I’ve just read Tessa Hadley’s wonderful novella The Party. More than full-length novels, novellas are capable of approaching perfection – think of Death in Venice, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis – and The Party (although very different from either of those works!) has that life-enhancing sense of being flawless, unimprovable. I know it will be one of those books that I remember in detail years after reading it.
My comfort read
Not fiction at all. Fiction is too close to life, perhaps, to be that comforting. For comfort I read poetry – Virgil, Wang Wei, Auden – and medieval history, something like Iris Origo’s Merchant of Prato.