Lily King: ‘I couldn’t get past the first 20 pages of Pride and Prejudice’ | Books

My earliest memory of reading
The Little Engine That Could. My mother used to read to me at night and one day I could read to myself. I read over and over in bed, the story of the brave little train that crossed the mountain when all the big ones refused. The joy of that did not end. I must have been four years old.

My favorite book growing up
I really liked Judy Blume. A fanatic. My favorite, the one that got me thinking about becoming a writer for the first time, is It’s Not the End of the World. It’s told in the first person (which was a revelation to me) in the words of a 12-year-old whose parents are divorcing. The dialogue is funny and sharp. It was the opposite of Through the Looking Glass: Blume helped me see at the age of nine how all the drama and madness and humor and meaning are here in everyday life.

A book that changed me as a teenager
I read a short story by Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, when I was 14 or 15 in high school. Like George Willard, I lived in a small town and watched. Like him, I saw many strange things and wanted to run away. I think it was a book in my youth that really cemented my desire to be a writer, that made me feel like it wasn’t something strange to want to do. And what was written in this book made me feel very sick.

Authors who changed my mind
I went to professional writing school and wrote a lot of short stories, clear, concise, and as soon as I got there two things happened: I met my best friend Laura McNeal and I read Virginia Woolf for the first time. The writings of each of these women changed mine. I was surfing the surface. I came out of the program a very different writer.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I have to go back to Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World. I vividly remember sitting on my bed reading that book and deciding to become a writer. I thought I would write children’s books, books exactly like his. It still amazes me that it didn’t turn out that way, that I didn’t write a single children’s book. However.

Author I went back to
I was given Pride and Prejudice the summer I was 16 and I black that. I couldn’t get past the first 20 pages. I picked it up again when I was heartbroken and maybe I wanted to go harder, but it was a revelation. I have read all of Jane Austen’s novels dozens of times now. I always go back to them, Temptation and Pride and Prejudice a little more than the others.

I read this book again
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner is another one that I didn’t appreciate in high school but I’ve gone back to several times in my life and find more there each time. Words, the beauty and exploration of language, the depth of family problems, race struggles, mental illness, southern heritage. Much of American history, past and present, can be found in that book published in 1929.

I can’t read this book anymore
Oh, don’t make me say that. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. I really enjoyed this book as a teenager. But I think it’s best to leave the story of a priest falling in love with a girl out of my mind.

A book I found later in life
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book had inspired me for years, and I finally read it last summer. Now I have become another convert. One hundred and sixty-six beautiful pages. I have never read a book that explains so well how one can live, to be completely obedient to life.

The books I am currently reading
I usually have several things going on at the same time. I’ve been working my way through Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which is getting better now that the war has started. I’m reading too Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips, and researching a new book, The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh, The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is troubling me.

My comfort read
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: a classic novel that’s fun.