WHATBOOK..?
...are you reading now?
I’VE just finished Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows, a novel about a brilliant young pianist intent on committing suicide. It’s obviously a sad subject, but what gave me heart throughout were Toews’s wonderful descriptions of family life in a Mennonite community. I laughed all the way through, surprising though that may sound.
...would you take to a desert island?
EUDORA WELTY’S The Golden Apples, not only because it’s a beautifully written book that stands up under many re-readings, but because if I were on a desert island, these linked stories about the inhabitants of a small Mississippi town would serve to remind me of all the funny, complicated, touching ways that human beings in general interact with each other.
...first gave you the reading bug?
THE first ‘chapter book’ that I can recall reading to myself was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, when I must have been nine or ten years old. I sank into it heart and soul. When I came to the death of Beth, I was so stunned that I simply didn’t believe it could have happened. I kept reading and re-reading that passage, and then looking around me and trying to take it in. That was the book that led me to spend my childhood fantasising about old age, because I thought when I was old I would finally be able to sit in a chair and read all day long without any grown-ups interrupting me. (Little did I know that when you’re old, your back won’t let you sit that long and your eyes can’t focus up close for that long.)
...left you cold?
FOR some reason, I completely missed out on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights when I was a teenager — which was apparently the stage at which every current woman friend I can think of read it and fell in love with Heathcliff. When I finally did try it, at some point in my 30s, I was so appalled by Heathcliff that I started doubting the mental stability of all those friends. This was their notion of the ideal man? Weirdly, though, just about all of them have perfectly nice husbands today, so they must have gained some sanity as they aged.