my earliest reading memory
The summer my middle sister was born, my mother and I would go to the shops in Cherryvalley in east Belfast to send her messages, and she would buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, which had illustrated stories from around the world. It came with cassette tapes of actors reading stories to tell you when to turn the page. My favorite was a Japanese folk tale called The Goblin Rat. I was only two years old, but I listened to it, fascinated and horrified, until I could memorize it.
my favorite book growing up
The Dark Is Rising series by Suzanne Cooper. I first read them when I was 10 – I’ve read the title book every midwinter since then, and read them with my 10-year-old son last year. They tell a haunting tale of the centuries-old battle between the forces of darkness and light, woven into the Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult sadness that makes them just as compelling now.
The book that inspired me to become a writer
How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnson? When I was 13 we read it in English and our homework was to write an extra chapter. I spent every spare minute that week writing – that intoxicating feeling of being transported to another world, until that world becomes more real than your own.
the book i came back to
I’ve always liked James Joyce’s Dubliners, but first read Ulysses in contradiction to undergraduate anxiety about not “getting” the references. Years later, I bought an edition that had no footnotes, no endnotes, just the novel itself – it was, and still is, one of the most wonderful reading experiences of my life. Even your text messages pale after reading Joyce.
the book i read again
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves. She is a Jungian psychoanalyst and Cantadora, keeper of the old stories, and this book is about reclaiming the secret gifts and power of mythology, the paths of your inner psyche, your wildness. I have read it in my 20s, 30s and 40s and each time different stories stood out to me. Every woman should read this book.
The book I could never read again
I like Rosamund Lehmann a lot, but I’ve never been able to get past the part in The Echoing Grove where two sisters try to kill a mouse by beating it to death, ineptly and painfully.
The book I discovered later in life
As teenagers, we used to challenge each other to leave the school library copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover open at the “dirty pieces” – where the spine was broken. But I actually didn’t read any DH Lawrence until I was 40, and I’m so glad I came across that book later in life, as a wife, as a mother. It’s not the frankness of sex that’s shocking – it’s the intensity of longing, the abandon of its rhythms. That would have been wasted on me already.
the book i’m reading now
I’ve recently completed Helen Benn’s debut film, The Daffodil Days, which I loved – an account of Sylvia Plath’s last years, told in a complex series of stories by people close to her at some point. It’s hard to know what to expect after this, but I have high hopes for Courtea Newland’s The Art of Opposition, a book of essays “on hope, resilience, and creative expression beyond the mainstream,” from a writer I know to be an extremely sharp and compassionate thinker.
read my rest
Not that the stories themselves are comfortable – far from it – but I re-read Laurie Moore’s Self-Help. It’s great to know that each story, like Philip Larkin’s definition of a poem, is a perfect verbal device to take you through your experience.
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