William Gibson: ‘I read Naked Lunch when it was still quasi-illicit’
The book I am currently readingHari Kunzru’s Red Pill. Topical (to say the very least)!
The book that changed my lifeSo many have! I don’t think of this in terms of landmark game-changers, but of as a matter of cumulative effect. One very early example would be Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. It was my introduction to the idea that the sort of book I was looking for didn’t necessarily have to be labeled as science fiction. Another would be Level 7, by Mordecai Roshwald, which would also have been my first experience of anti-war satire.
The book that had the greatest influence on my writingOne of them, certainly, though I’m still not quite sure how, wasNaked Lunch, by William S Burroughs, which I read in secondhand hardcover when it was still quasi-illicit.
The book I think is most underratedJack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence. A near future that chillingly predicted the foulest possible outcome of our past four years in the US.
The book that changed my mindCormac McCarthy’s Suttree, which admitted me, long into adulthood, to the adult culture and time of my childhood in the American south. Until discovering Suttree, I’d not found the voice that could do that for me, Faulker having always felt instinctively too much like a part of the problem he was describing (if indeed he thought it a problem).
The last book that made me laughM John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Beginsto Rise Again. Though I suppose not every reader would. Not to say that I’d consider it comedy. When it’s funny, though, it’s much funnier than that.
The book I’m ashamed not to have readMoby- Dick, perhaps? Actually, I’m more embarrassed by starting to feel as though I have read it, but that only through following an account on Twitter that daily posts some brief and evocative snippet of it. Might this not be the way our descendants, such as they may be, experience literature?
The book I give as a giftKellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, that most steampunk of all works of British history (and if you know of better, let me know). With its own intensely hierarchic organisation, the Victorian criminal underworld dizzyingly mirrored proper Victorian society in wonderfully revelatory ways. Entirely serious, but hypnotically entertaining.
My earliest reading memoryPogo comic strips by Walt Kelly. My mother had to teach me to read, as I wasn’t doing well at it in school.
My comfort read“No More Yoga of the Night Club”, by Iain Sinclair, in his collection Slow Chocolate Autopsy. I associate it with being jet lagged in London, though somehow in a wonderfully comforting way.
• Agency by William Gibson will be published by Penguin later this month.