This is a supplement to my Top Ten Books to give you a little more insight into my reading habits. I believe the more you know about the reader, the more you know about the writer.
Favourite Format – There seem to be ever more ways to read books, from paperbacks, e-books, downloads to your phone and audio versions. I am a traditionalist: I prefer hardbacks, and will always read a book this way if I can. Which leads me to…
Favourite Place To Read – In the bath. I can spend hours up to my neck in hot water and bubbles, which partly explains why I could never become an e-book convert. A close second favourite place is by the fire on an autumn afternoon. Silence is an essential quality. I can never understand how people can read in noisy places or – even more astonishing – while listening to music
Favourite Book – In this instance I’m not talking about the content, rather the physical object itself. I believe everyone should have a book that they treasure for its aesthetic appeal. Mine is a folio edition of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. It is a gorgeous hardback with a cloth binding and a gilted cover that depicts the patterned ceiling of the Sheikh Lutfallah Mosque in Iran. (See photo.) The paper is thick and crisp and it is beautifully illustrated with photos and hand-drawn maps. Just holding this edition can cheer me up!
Favourite Shakespeare – Julius Caesar. The politics and conspiracy of the play are fascinating, as are the displays of how rhetoric can manipulate the mob. However, the main reason this play has such a hold on me is the parting between Brutus and Cassius in Act 5, Scene 1. These are some of Shakespeare’s simplest lines but I have always found them painfully moving. Like other books in my Top Ten list I always keep a copy of the play on my desk
Favourite Poet – John Masefield. Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, Masefield has fallen out of fashion these days. There’s a longing and loneliness yet warmth to his best work that captivates me: ‘O how I longed for someone who had read / Even one book of poems to its end / Had noted what was living and what dead’ (From ‘Sitting Alone’, 1966)
Favourite Children’s Book – There are so many, from Roald Dahl to Angela Sommer-Bordenburg. Perhaps the easiest thing is to choose the book I read most as a child. That was an abridged version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. You might be interested to know it plays a significant part in the novel I’m currently working on
Favourite Book as a Teenager – James Herbert’s Domain. Several years ago I re-read it for the first time in ages and was vaguely embarrassed by the actual writing. Nevertheless the narrative remains relentless and gripping, and its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world is pitch black. Between the ages of 13-16 I would read it several times a year
Favourite Auto/Biography – I tend to read several biographies a year, with an emphasis on historical figures and filmmakers, and zero tolerance for celebrity memoirs. The biography that has stayed with me the most is Peter Ackroyd’s magisterial life of Dickens. It completely changed my opinion of the Victorian novelist, from someone I was forced to read at school to…
Favourite Dickens – After the Ackroyd I decided to read a Dickens a year and although I’ve fallen out of the habit of late I did get through a considerable part of his oeuvre. My favourite is his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend. It has a wonderfully convoluted plot, though I remember it most for how it challenges social conventions and its wonderful murky atmosphere
Favourite Book About Film – I read a lot of about film and even have a dedicated bookcase for the subject, everything from the silent era to ‘makings of’, biographies of influential directors and a stack of BFI Guides. My favourite though is Michael Ondatjee’s The Conversations, a series of discussions with Walter Murch about the ‘language’ of film editing. I found it unputdownable. This is essential reading for anyone interested in cinema
And finally…
The One Book I Should Have Read But Haven’t – People are always surprised when I confess to having never read Austen. The 19th Century Russians are another big omission. But the one book I feel I really should have read but haven’t is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I’ve had a copy for years, so am not sure why I’ve never got round to it. Perhaps I should stop writing this blog and take it off the shelf…