WHATBOOK..?
. ..are you reading now?
I’M READING Middlemarch by George Eliot for the third time. I know it’s a bit of a cliche as it’s pretty well everybody’s favourite book, but that doesn’t stop it from being mine, too.
The novel is so compulsively readable that my life becomes a mere shadow when I’m reading it — those characters become more substantial than the socalled real people I meet in my so-called real life.
This story of a country town in the 19th century is so panoramic, so incandescently intelligent, and so very humane — one minds about every character, even the walk-on parts.
. . .would you take to a desert island?
NEEDLESS to say, Middlemarch is the book I would take to a desert island. But can I add another one, just because I’d need to have a laugh?
It would be Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent. I met a man once who, like Othello, nearly suffocated his wife with a pillow because she was laughing so much when she read it and he couldn’t sleep.
It’s the book that made Bryson’s name. In it, he travels America in search of that old, Frank Capra, small-town magic — white picket fences, that sort of thing.
All he finds are malls and a wasteland of disappointment, but he manages to make his journey just about the funniest thing you’ll ever read.
...first gave you the reading bug?
MY PARENTS were writers — my father wrote 120 books (naval biographies, children’s books, anything really) and my mother wrote and illustrated picture books. That meant that there were always books around, but I wasn’t much of a reader when I was little. I preferred playing cowboys and Indians with my sister Alex.
What really started me reading were the Just William books, by the strangely genderless Richmal Crompton. Like the Bryson book, they were laugh-out-loud funny, and the 11-year-old hero of them all, William Brown, was my favourite person in the world.
But what I loved most was the grownup, unpatronising language — ‘testily’, ‘unctuously’ and so on. It ignited my love of words.
. ..left you cold?
I’M AFRAID Saul Bellow has always left me cold. Every man I’ve been involved with has loved his books, so I’ve tried again and again to get through his Herzog.
But I simply can’t. I’m so sorry. Though I’m sure Saul Bellow wouldn’t have cared a fig — he looked as if he had a healthy sense of his own talent. You can’t win them all.