Best books… Posy Simmonds
Posy Simmonds, the cartoonist, illustrator and author of Tamara Drewe and Gemma Bovery, picks her five favourite books. Her most recent book, Literary Life Revisited, is published by Jonathan Cape at £18.99
Ah yes, I Remember It
Well: Paris 1961-1975 by Ronald Searle, 1987 (out of print). Ronald Searle became my hero as a child when I discovered his St Trinian’s cartoons in my parents’ bookshelves. A deeper appreciation of his extraordinary talents came later. (I used to try to imitate his jagged, scurrying, rococo lines.) The drawings in this book show Searle’s superb eye for mood, character and place. Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro, 1971 (Vintage £8.99). I often reread these interlinked stories about the dilemmas of girls growing up in a small Canadian town in the 1950s. Alice Munro is always a moving and insightful writer – here, about the agonies of first dates and the taboo of female intellect: a girl can’t be clever and sexy. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge, 1937 (out of print). My perfect book for browsing: a rich, idiosyncratic collection of slang, jargon, oaths and obscenity (ancient and modern). The Australian entries are particularly pithy. The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne, 1962 (Penguin £9.99). A brilliant, comprehensive analysis of the battle of Verdun, full of human detail. The course of this epic ten-month slaughter is seen
from all levels, from the generals behind the lines, to the wretched men in the trenches.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 1856 (Penguin £8.99). I’ve read this many times, but my first reading, while at school, was the most intense and memorable. We were all rather innocent girls, reading the novel in French, with the aid of dictionaries. Because of this laborious process, Mme Bovary’s loveless marriage, her adulteries and her horrible death were revealed at a titillatingly slow pace. She was the first literary heroine I’d read who transgressed – vain, greedy, a bad wife and mother – but who also moved you to tears.