My favourite book growing up
Brian Jacques’s Redwall (and all its sequels). All I wanted was to be a squirrel in the Mossflower Woods!
The books that changed me as a teenager
I read China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and The City & the City when I was in college. I had been falling out of love with fantasy – I felt too old for Redwall, and I thought I’d outgrown the genre – but Miéville’s work opened the door to the enormous world of adult fantasy literature that grappled with the problems I was now interested in.
The writers who changed my mind
I had never been wildly interested in books that are primarily or even largely about romantic relationships, but in the past few years, works by Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto and Mieko Kawakami have changed my mind. They have opened my eyes to the potential in describing the subtle shifts in any interpersonal encounter, and I’m working out how to do that in my own writing now.
The authors I came back to
It took me a while to understand Vladimir Nabokov’s brand of humour. I tried Pnin when I was in college and it just didn’t work. I gave it another try last month and I couldn’t stop giggling. It also took me a while to find the charm in Victor Hugo’s bloviating. In high school, I only read the bits of Les Misérables about the Friends of the ABC (I had a crush on Enjolras, just like everyone else.) Recently I read the unabridged edition, and I’m old enough now to enjoy every rabbit-hole sentence about Waterloo, argot and the Parisian sewer system.
The book I reread
David Mitchell was my favourite author at college – I raved about The Bone Clocks to everyone I met. Cloud Atlas didn’t work so well for me, but I recently reread both, and this time I was stunned. Cloud Atlas (and its woefully underappreciated film adaptation) is so gorgeous and life-affirming. It was nice to find Mitchell’s writing is just as magical for me now as it was back then.
The book I could never read again
I’ve just bought a copy of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends for my friend’s toddler’s birthday party. But who am I kidding? I still love those books!
The book I discovered later in life
It took me a long time to get around to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which I only finished this summer despite my love of his other work. It is overwritten, melodramatic, deeply silly camp. I love it.
The book I am currently reading
Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, on the recommendation of my French translator. He lives in Spain and also does Spanish to French translations – we bonded over our love of Borges, and he insisted I read Vargas Llosa too. I’m also on an existentialism kick, so Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus are high on my list. I’ve only now found out that the animated film character Marcel the Shell is a joke about Gabriel Marcel’s concept of the hard shell that closes us off to new possibilities.
My comfort read
Anything by Ray Bradbury.