WHATBOOK..?
...are you reading now?
I HAVE a couple of books on the go at the moment. I’m reading Bloody Sam, a biography of director Sam Peckinpah, but I keep having to pause to go back and re-watch some of his films. I’ve reached the section dealing with The Ballad Of Cable Hogue, but I realised I’ve never seen it, so I figure I should watch it before proceeding any further.
I’m also reading, coincidentally, Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames. I’m not usually a consumer of fantasy fiction, but his debut, Kings Of The Wyld, was hugely enjoyable.
I’ve been re-reading Evelyn Waugh over the past year or so, and am about to be distracted by Scoop. Some of the books have aged better than others. Black Mischief should probably come with a warning attached, but A Handful Of Dust remains devastating.
...you’d take to a desert island?
I AM the least gifted handyman I know, so one of those DIY books with a section on home-building, with a subsection on edible plants, would be useful, or else I wouldn’t last a week.
In the absence of the preferred option, I’ll take George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’ll never read it otherwise. At the very least, I can use it as a pillow, or a handy step.
For pure enjoyment, though, I’d pack the complete Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not sure I can entirely like or trust anyone who doesn’t love Jeeves and Wooster. Oddly, the Blandings stories don’t quite work for me, perhaps because Lord Emsworth lacks Bertie Wooster’s enthusiasm for life, and Beach is no Jeeves.
...first gave you the reading bug?
IT WAS one of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven novels, although I can’t recall which. It was the first book I ever read unaided, and I worked out the longer words phonetically, breaking them down into syllables. For most of my childhood, I believed the word ‘cupboard’ was pronounced ‘cup-board’. My mother must have thought she was living with Little Lord Fauntleroy. Many years later, a younger reader pointed out that the first novel I’d ever read unaided was essentially a mystery, albeit one of the garden shed variety.
...left you cold?
MOST recently, Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner — skilful, but lacking heart — with a dishonourable mention for Cari Mora by Thomas Harris, which really is just a stinker. It gives me no pleasure to say that.
Finally, I’ve reached the age where I’m increasingly conscious of all the gaps in my knowledge — musical and cinematic, as well as literary — so I’ve been trying to read books I probably should have picked up years ago.
Martin Amis’s Money had been on my shelf for a long time, and had been recommended to me by friends, so I read it earlier this year. I just wished it would end. I’m too old to want to spend time in the company of people I wouldn’t even have liked when I was young.
■ The Dirty South by John Connolly is out now (hodder, £20).