The book I am currently reading
A wonderful new anthology – It Occurs to Me That I Am America, edited by Jonathan Santlofer – on the theme of imperilled democracy. (Disclosure: there is a prose piece of mine in it.)
The book that changed my life
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass certainly had a profound effect on both my life and my writing.
The book I wish I’d written
This list would be enormous … But it is unanswerable because unimaginable: no one else could have written Ulysses, Crime and Punishment or Moby-Dick, and any other book except the individuals who wrote them.
The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
Possibly the stories of Franz Kafka. Or Dubliners. Or Wuthering Heights. Or ...
The book that changed my mind
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has a profound effect on writers and poets – especially poets – who may have been taught as undergraduates that the Whitmanesque vision is “romantic”, “bombastic”, “barbaric yawping rather than poetry” – only to discover the extraordinary power of the very incantatory poetry most sneered at by formalists.
The last book that made me cry
Forgive me for what may seem improbable, but I am often moved to tears in writing a novel – or rather, in rereading, when the novel is completed, and I am given the task of reading page proofs. The emotional momentum that drives the novel is one that the novelist must harness, channel, perhaps suppress in the writing, but it is unleashed and raw in the reading and one feels wholly vulnerable, exposed.
The last book that made me laugh
Like many, I have been laughing aloud at countless passages in Michael Wolff’s scathing, hilarious, terrifying and (in an odd way) comforting Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
The book I couldn’t finish
Claiming not to have finished James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the sort of humblebrag one might expect from a deranged Potus but in fact this is true. (In my defence, I have started numerous times, and each time begin reading ahead, skipping passages, and pages, and finally thrilling to Anna Livia Plurabelle before, another time, ruefully giving up.)
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
The list would be enormous … but would certainly include works of fiction such as The Last of the Just , André Schwarz-Bart’s novel about the Holocaust – intimidated by the subject matter.
The book I give as a gift
It is never likely to be the same title. Impulsive buys, for particular readers.
The book I’d most like to be remembered for
Like most writers I would be grateful to be remembered for something … It would certainly depend upon individual readers. My 2000 novel Blonde, perhaps. It was the novel that caused me the greatest heartache and left me most exhausted. But failing that, perhaps my memoir The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age.
