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From
January 2002, but I'm
not sure which paper this was written for, to be honest.
What are you
reading now?
The Collected Poems
of Du Fu (Anvil Poetry Press £7-95) – a Chinese poet from the 8th
century – (again!) because it’s so incredible to feel the humanity
of a writer from the distance of 1300 years.
Would you take to a
desert island?
I’ve read Alexander
Durrel’s Alexandria Quartet (Faber and Faber £14-99) twice so far –
and it’s one of those books I still feel I haven’t quite got – so
it’s something I’d love to have the chance to go over again and
really suck it dry. Lord of the Rings (Harpercollins 19-99) got me
into reading books when I was ten years old, and also made me decide
I wanted to write stories when I grew up – which never seemed
possible till I was published. My school’s career councellors never
said ‘…and all the kids who want to be authrs come and stand in this
corner please!’ Other doorstops I could use to build a raft after a
few years of solitude include War and Peace (Penguin £1-25) , A
Suitable Boy (Orion £9-99) and my diaries (ages 12-24) – which
probably need destroying anyway.
What would you give
to dying man?
The Essntial Chuang
Tzu (Shambhala Publicatons £11-99) – the Daoist text from 12th
century China – because it’s thought-provoking and funny, and not
too long.
What left you cold?
Reading Midnight’s
Children (Vintage £6-99) was like wading through glue – and I gave
up half-way because I didn’t care about the characters and because
the prose was more convoluted than my university text books. Other
books that leave me cold usually have a word on the first page
that’s 8 syllables long and which means ‘blue’. As a writer I don’t
see anything particularly clever about having an enormous thesaurus
to hand – and reading a beautiful sentence out of simple words is
much more satisfying. It’s the difference between a simple fruit
salad and death by chocolate. |
