My earliest reading memory
As a toddler, I’m told that I kept reciting: “She’s got a party frock on, he’s got a party frock on”, while turning the pages of a favourite picture book. I’ve no idea what the book was, but I was apparently adamant that both she and he could wear a party frock. Maybe the start of my interest in gender equality…
One of my earliest reading memories was the Milly Molly Mandy books. I don’t remember much about the stories, but I loved the map of the village inside the front covers. Apparently, the village was based on Alfriston in East Sussex.
My favourite books growing up
I devoured books while I was growing up and I used to read under the bedcovers at night with a torch, or creep to the window to read in the lamplight from the street.
I loved The Wind in the Willows, with its magical illustrations by Ernest Shepard. Mole’s cosy underground home and his boating excursions with Ratty transported me to another world.
Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories were also a favourite. A tomboy myself, I identified with the character of George and her adventures, but I thought Anne was ‘soppy’ and Julian ‘bossy’. I particularly liked the stories about Kirrin Island, perhaps because we had family holidays on the Isle of Wight. The class elements went over my head at the time though.
Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain stands out as a book I loved at 10 or 11. The story of children who formed the Blue Door theatre group was the start of my ambition to act (realised years later).
The book that changed me as a teenager
As a teenager, my older sister was a great influence on my reading habits. I read EM Forster and Virginia Woolf in my early teens – far too young to understand them fully.
It’s hard to pinpoint one book that changed me, but Wuthering Heights made a huge impression on me. I’d never read anything with such passion, wildness and cruelty. It was (and is) a very disturbing book. Many years after, I lived in a Pennine village not far from Haworth and loved walking over the moors, like Cathy.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I came back to Virginia Woolf in my late teens and To the Lighthouse made the biggest impact, perhaps because of studying it for A-level. In a funny sort of way (and perhaps sacrilegious to suggest), it was like a more adult version of the Famous Five, with Mr Ramsay and the distant lighthouse similar to George’s father – Uncle Quentin to the others – and Kirrin Island.
I engaged with Woolf’s focus on emotions and family relationships and admired her stream of consciousness style, which I wanted to emulate – though in later life I found her books too mannered and have been reluctant to re-read them.
The book or author I came back to
Although I’d read and enjoyed reading Jane Austen’s novels at school, I didn’t really appreciate her subtlety and social commentary until much later. After a bad bout of flu left me bed-bound for a fortnight a few years ago, I worked through all the novels again and read Persuasion for the first time. Nuances of class and gender seemed far more obvious to me as an adult and I enjoyed the humour much more too.
The book I re-read
During Covid-19 lockdowns, when libraries and bookshops were closed, I re-read several of my favourite authors, including Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Iain Banks.
A standout book that I re-read was Marge Piercy’s Vida. Largely set in the 1960s, Vida is an environmental activist who describes her part in a radical underground network resembling the Weathermen. It’s a gripping novel with a(nother) feisty woman protagonist.
I spent a year in the USA as a student in the late 1960s, when communal living and opposition to the Vietnam war were at their height, so this book resonates with my memories of those experiences. It’s also prescient of current events in the US.
The book I discovered later in life
Although I studied American authors at university, for some reason I never read any Henry James. A few years ago, I discovered The Portrait of a Lady – and it was a revelation. Published in 1881, it comes over as a very modern novel, particularly the portrayal of the free-spirited central character, Isabel.
It’s a fascinating novel for many reasons. It explores American high society and expatriate life in London and Florence. Wealth, gender and cultural divisions are all part of an exploration of freedom and betrayal, centring on Isabel’s attempt to keep and then regain her independence. It’s also a chilling portrayal of coercive control in a marriage.
One of my top ten books.
The book I am currently reading
I’m trying to move out of my comfort zone and explore books I wouldn’t normally read. So when The Guardian did a feature on Japanese fiction, I put some on my Christmas present list.
After reading the delightful and moving More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, I’ve moved on to Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley. Bradley, though not Japanese himself, lived there for many years and worked as a translator. The book is curiously a novel within a novel – Flo finds a book left on the Tokyo subway and starts to read it. I’m immersed in the story she reads, about a stern grandmother getting to know her teenage grandson.
So far, I’m intrigued and involved.
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