WHAT BOOK?

...are you reading now?

I’VE finally overcome my reluctance about science fiction and fantasy, which I’ve always respected but seldom actually read. I admit that I’ve accepted, more or less on faith, the traditional objections that this particular genre can be long on convoluted plots and short on complex characters, as well as compelling, original or even well-crafted language.

Wrong. After a sound thrashing from a few of my students, I’m about to finish Get In Trouble by Kelly Link, which is ravishingly good. I’ll go on to more of her books, and then embark on Nathan Ballingrud, having read Three Mothers Mountain, a fantastic short story of his. I am, on one hand, sorry I didn’t arrive earlier at the sci-fi and fantasy party, but on the other, I’m glad to have arrived at all.

I should add that I’ve recently loved Ann Enright’s The Wren, The Wren; Claire Keegan’s So Late In The Day, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods. It’s not as if I’m suddenly disavowing books that don’t involve monsters, witches and eerie noises coming from the woods out back.

The trouble, if trouble is the word for it, is that there are too many remarkable books, and too little time.

. . . would you take to a desert island?

MY INITIAL reaction is if that’s a requirement I wouldn’t go to the island at all, whatever the penalty. I find this classic question difficult in its implication that one has a single favourite book, which is simply not how reading works, for me. I’d have trouble narrowing it down to ten. What would my future be like without Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon?

That said, what’s most interesting about the question is, which book(s) feel to you like lifelong companions? Which books do you imagine reading again and yet again, before old age extinguishes your eyesight entirely? And so, not to be overly coy, I’d take Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, commit it to memory and walk around all day reciting it to myself.

...first gave you the reading bug?

WOOLF’S Mrs Dalloway, which I read in high school, and which was my first intimation of what a writer can do using only ink, paper and the words in the dictionary. Until then I’d never imagined sentences like that, nor had it occurred to me that a writer, any writer, could look at the world and its inhabitants with that much nuance and clarity, combined with what I can only call some kind of stern compassion.

I hadn’t been particularly bookish as a child, but neither had I encountered language, and a vision, that astonishing.

It’s no coincidence that I’d take a different novel by Woolf to that hypothetical island. I’m monogamous, in my way.

...left you cold?

I ALWAYS stop reading before a book has a chance to leave me cold. There’s not enough time for that.

DAY by Michael Cunningham (4th Estate, €17.50) is out now.