15 hours ago
10
My earliest reading memory
Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up.
My favourite book growing up
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what gets you, and I’m sure the obsession with rugged independence and the repression of foundational violence did me no good, but I liked the landscapes and the combination of domesticity and adventure.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Teenagers are easily led. I saw myself in some of the plain, clever girls of Victorian fiction, reinforcing the 1990s message that cleverness was unattractive and attractiveness was stupid. Young women shouldn’t be allowed to read the mid-century canon until they’ve learned critical thinking; the Beat poets, Updike, Amis et al taught me to see women and the world through the eyes of white men, and also to admire an excellent sentence. I suppose both were useful in their way.
The writer who changed my mind
All books change my mind, that’s what they are for. Recently Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes altered the way I understand much of the world around me.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t think it was a book. Before I could write, my party trick was storytelling. Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I’d told earlier weren’t true.
The author I came back to
I’ve just rediscovered Barbara Pym. When I first read her, I was so determined not to become a valiantly cheerful and shabby middle-aged English woman of limited means that I didn’t want to know if they had inner lives. I wouldn’t say I’m now particularly cheerful, valiantly or otherwise, but apart from that – well, let’s just say she’s a brilliant novelist and I was wrong.
The book I reread
Most books worth reading are worth rereading. I revisit Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, noticing how their teenaged heroines and wise or bitter older women look different as I age. Other lodestars include Janet Frame’s autobiography, everything written by Miriam Toews, Bill Reid’s essays on art. And we should not forget the books of staying alive either: Meera Sodha’s and Anna Jones’s cookbooks fall open at the right pages and Felix Ford’s and Kate Davies’ knitting books bring happy hours and favourite jumpers.
The book I could never read again
I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre, and these days I can’t see around the eroticised abuse, not that there isn’t some of that in Jane Eyre too. Exemplary narrative structure all the same.
The book I discovered later in life
Discovering books is like discovering landscapes; they were already there. I love it when writers reach me in translation decades after they were published: Magda Szabo, Alba De Céspedes, Azar Nafisi.
The book I am currently reading
I am a polyamorous reader: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story; Gun-Britt Sundström’s Engagement; Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems.
