My earliest reading memory
Tolkien’s The Hobbit, read around the time of my sixth birthday, when I was home from school with mumps. It turned me from a painstaking decoder of printed letters into someone flying through a new medium. Books have been portals for me ever since. Many other things too, but portals first.
My favourite book growing up
CS Lewis’s Narnia books. It was the sorrow of my life at the age of 10 that there wasn’t one more of them to read. A few years ago I found myself in a position to do something about that, at least for myself, but (cough) I am under legal obligations not to talk about it.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin, which did things I didn’t know were allowed with gender and with the shape of story, and showed me that an imagined setting, a built world, could ring as true narratively as anything observed in the rooms or the streets of this world.
The writer who changed my mind
Alasdair Gray, for showing me you can make things out of parts of yourself you’re ashamed of. AS Byatt, for showing me how you can recreate other arts inside the container of the novel. Penelope Fitzgerald for demonstrating the mysterious elegance of extreme concision. The great American fantasist John Crowley, with his toymaker’s sentences, showing me you can hide the real subject of a story in the margins, in the spaces between chapters. But I could go on. My mind is still open to revision, thank God.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Again, many rather than one, offering moments of recognition when you realise: if this is what making a book is, I could do it. A kind of excited fellow-feeling. It’s a different sensation from the hat-off envy with which you greet a book you know you could never have written, as it comes from a different kind of mind. I feel that, with a barrowload of luck and a following wind, I might be able to produce something a bit like Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, generative of a similar kind of pleasure. (And that, in part, is what my new one Cahokia Jazz means to be.) But I know I can’t ever resemble Patricia Lockwood: she of the astonishing criticism, the astonishing memoir-novels.
The book or author I came back to
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Inscrutably boring when I was 20, just a lot of posh partygoers yabbering on. Now a mesmerising celebration of the fluidity of experience itself.
The book I could never read again
E Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet. A genuine pioneering masterpiece of children’s literature – but it contains a pogrom, played for laughs.
The book I am currently reading
I’ve just finished Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, a meditation on mortality and history that somehow manages to explore five entirely different destinies, moods and epochs within one forensic voice.
My comfort read
Katherine Addison’s fantasy The Goblin Emperor is hard to beat: a gentle drama in which the unprepared and accidental inheritor of a throne gradually and convincingly prevails by sheer goodness of heart. Witty, elegant, kind. Restores optimism; banishes 99.9% of Donald Trump from your consciousness.
• Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford is published by Faber. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023, from Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024.
