Nick Hornby: ‘I can quote more Molesworth than I can Shakespeare'
The book I am currently readingSebastian Smee’s brilliant The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. I can never get enough of books about how artists, in any medium, create things, and Smee’s book is riveting – readable, sharp, perfectly grounded in the biographical moments that change lives.
The book that changed my lifeAnne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Until I picked it up in a bookshop and read the first couple of pages I was an unsuccessful scriptwriter, with no ambitions to write prose. But I suddenly saw how I might be able to approach it, and Fever Pitch, bizarrely, was the end result.The book I wish I’d writtenI never wish I’d written someone else’s book. I am always happy to be simply a reader. My favourite novel is David Copperfield, but if I’d written it, it wouldn’t be as good, and I’d be dead.
The book I think is most underratedLarry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove has a lot of admirers, particularly in the US (and it won a Pulitzer) but people still seem to think I’m joking when I tell them it’s up there with the best of Dickens, probably because it’s a western. It’s one of my favourite-ever novels, and I envy people who haven’t yet come across it.The last book that made me cryI think it might have been Francesca Segal’s Mother Ship, a beautiful memoir about the author’s premature twins, their fierce struggle for life and their eventual survival.
The last book that made me laughVendela Vida’s forthcoming We Run the Tides, a smart, moving, surprising literary novel about a teenage girl in the 1980s. Unlike most literary novels, it has a good joke every couple of pages.The book I couldn’t finishIt’s not that I couldn’t finish it – I will, one day – but Andrew Solomon’s overwhelming and intelligent Far from the Tree is nearly 1,000 pages long, and each chapter is an intensely emotional experience. It’s a book about disability, and I picked it up originally because I have a severely autistic son, but really it’s a book about everything: parents, children, ambition, how to live in extreme circumstances. I had to take a break.The book I’m ashamed not to have readI don’t have the slightest sense of shame about not having read anything. I read all the time, and I always have done. I have read a lot of things that other people haven’t. The only book I intend to read that everyone else seems to have read is Middlemarch, because people I trust tell me that I will love it.The book I give as a giftI give books as gifts, a lot, but never the same book. Surely gifts should be chosen with care, taking into account the personality and taste of the reader, rather than the giver? The last book I gave as a gift was Larry McMurtry’s book of essays, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I gave it to someone who loved Lonesome Dove, someone who, like me, has had a deep and long relationship with American culture. This book is about an American in a onehorse town and his deep relationship with Europe.
The book I’d like to be remembered forI’d settle for any of them staying in print for the rest of my life. I think High Fidelitywould have some funny footnotes, if it’s still around in a hundred years.My earliest reading memoryThe Janet and John series, I suppose. The first piece of fiction I fell in love with was Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. Kästner was an extraordinary author, a poet and satirist and screenwriter and alcoholic who also wrote the equally lovable Lottie and Lisa, later filmed twice as The Parent Trap. He has an asteroid named after him.My comfort readAny of the Molesworth books lift my spirits as soon as I open them. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle were both geniuses, and I can quote more Molesworth than I can Shakespeare. I can never do justice to the brilliance of the misspellings, though.
• Just Like You by Nick Hornby is published by Viking(£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.