My earliest reading memory
My mum taught me to read before I went to school, but I don’t remember what I read then. My earliest memory is of being given Janet and John books when I started school and hating them. They were boring as hell. “The cat sat on the mat.” That’s no way to start a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat – that would have been a little more interesting.
My favourite book growing up
The Muddle-Headed Wombat books always made me laugh. I loved all the spoonerisms and malapropisms.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‑Four when I was 13, and it had a profound impact. I heard doublespeak all around me. Naturally, as a teenager, you’re inclined to think that adults are hypocritical, but it also made me think about the news in a different, more questioning way. It’s probably why I ended up studying PPE. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, it is as relevant as ever – “thoughtcrime” could be a term invented in the culture wars today. And we may have believed we’d escaped perpetual war, but now we’re having to reconsider.
The book that changed my mind
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté. It’s a radical reframing of how we view all human development. He makes surprising connections between an individual’s psychology and global issues, between the spiritual and the medical, between mental illness and politics. Maté’s focus is the psychology of addiction, but the stories he tells about his patients and his insight and compassion combine to reveal how addiction runs on a continuum through our society. We can be addicted to many things – social media, stress, power, shopping – in order to medicate and conceal our fears or pain.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Impossible. I can’t pick out a single one.
The book or author I came back to
I come back to two authors time and again – Tolstoy and Austen. I couldn’t imagine life without them.
The book I reread
A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul, the best tragicomedy ever written. It’s also a sideways look at colonialism, race and religion; the story of one man’s struggle to carve out his own place in the world. I first read it in my teens, and I still love it now.
The book I could never read again
In my late teens I hoovered up all of Zola’s novels, but I find them too unremittingly grim now.
The book I am currently reading
The Group by Mary McCarthy. It’s set in New York in the 1930s, following a group of young women, all graduates from the exclusive Vassar College. I’d often heard about the book as a must-read, but I’d never got round to it until now. It’s about love and sex and heartbreak, marriage and careers.
My comfort read
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard – a volumes of sprawling family saga spanning the 1930s to the 1950s. Howard is a sharp observer of human drama and psychology, and writes about pain, loss and longing superbly well. Somehow, for me, this works like a kind of balm.
