What's the best book you read in the last year?
The term "best" would have to stretch. There's reading that's important to me, in a personal way: I've been working my way through the books of the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of thinking over the content. "Best" as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson's new novel, Life After Life, ingenious and furiously energetic: it's exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game. There's rereading, very important to me now. Last year I was commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, and it gave me a reason to sit down with it again. It's a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I've pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how):
I'd like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters's Fingersmith: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder .?.?. my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I'd be 14, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.
In addition to your novels, you've also written a memoir. What makes a good memoir? Any recent memoirs you would recommend?
It's not recent, but I would recommend Bad Blood, by Lorna Sage. It's a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir's not an easy form. It's not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many people do begin. It's hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.
Are there particular kinds of stories you're drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don't like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she's so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.) I can take the marginally magical, but I find realism more fascinating and challenging; it is a challenge for me to pay attention to surfaces, not depths. I like novels about the past, not about the future. For light reading I like novels about the present, but consider them to be an extension of newspapers.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It's a story told in match statistics, but it's also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Old Daddy Shakespeare, of course. I don't believe in asking writers questions. I'd just follow him about for a day and see what the routine was. I'd be invisible, of course. I wouldn't want to spook him.
©2013 The New York Times
The term "best" would have to stretch. There's reading that's important to me, in a personal way: I've been working my way through the books of the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of thinking over the content. "Best" as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson's new novel, Life After Life, ingenious and furiously energetic: it's exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game. There's rereading, very important to me now. Last year I was commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, and it gave me a reason to sit down with it again. It's a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I've pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how):
I'd like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters's Fingersmith: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder .?.?. my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I'd be 14, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.
In addition to your novels, you've also written a memoir. What makes a good memoir? Any recent memoirs you would recommend?
It's not recent, but I would recommend Bad Blood, by Lorna Sage. It's a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir's not an easy form. It's not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many people do begin. It's hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.
Are there particular kinds of stories you're drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don't like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she's so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.) I can take the marginally magical, but I find realism more fascinating and challenging; it is a challenge for me to pay attention to surfaces, not depths. I like novels about the past, not about the future. For light reading I like novels about the present, but consider them to be an extension of newspapers.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It's a story told in match statistics, but it's also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Old Daddy Shakespeare, of course. I don't believe in asking writers questions. I'd just follow him about for a day and see what the routine was. I'd be invisible, of course. I wouldn't want to spook him.
©2013 The New York Times