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My earliest memory of reading
The summer my middle sister was born, my mother and I would walk to the shops in Cherryvalley, east Belfast, to give her her messages, and she would buy me the latest Storytellers, filmed around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading a story, a ding telling you when to open a page. I loved the Japanese fairy tale The Goblin Rat. I was only two years old, but I listened to it, and was so scared, that I memorized it.
My favorite book growing up
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising stories. I first read them when he was 10 years old – I read the title book in the fifth grade, and I read them last year with my 10 year old son. They tell the terrible story of the ancient war between the forces of darkness and light, woven into the Arthurian legend, which is shot by the main character of melancholy that makes them as compelling as ever.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? We read it in English when I was 13 and our homework was to write a chapter. I spent every spare moment that week writing my own – drunken thoughts staring at another world, until that world became more real than your own.
The I returned the book
I always loved Dubliners and James Joyce, but first read Ulysses in paroxysms of undergraduate anxiety about “not finding” references. A few years later, I bought a copy with no footnotes, no endnotes, just the book – it was, and continues to be, one of the best reading experiences of my life. Even your text messages keep reading Joyce.
I read this book again
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves. He is a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora, a keeper of ancient myths, and this book is about the mystical gifts and power of myths, the paths to your inner psyche, to restore your wildness. I’ve read it in my 20s, 30s and 40s, and different stories have appealed to me each time. Every woman should read this book.
I can’t read this book anymore
I love Rosamond Lehmann but I never got past the part of The Echoing Grove where two sisters try, unknowingly and awkwardly, to kill a rat to death.
A book I found later in life
As teenagers, we love to leave the school library of Lady Chatterley’s Lover open for “dirty pieces” – where the back is broken. But I didn’t really read any DH Lawrence until I was in my 40s, and I’m glad that I came to the book later in life, as a woman, as a mother. It’s not the expressiveness of sexuality that’s amazing – it’s the feeling of desire, leaving its music behind. That would have already thrown me off.
The book I am reading now
I’ve just finished Helen Bain’s The Daffodil Days, which I love – Sylvia Plath’s story last year, told in retrospect, in the most difficult stories of people who were close to her for a while. It’s hard to know what to follow, but I have high hopes for Courtia Newland’s Art of Opposition, a book of stories “about hope, courage and the expression of wisdom beyond what most people experience”, by a writer I know to be thoughtful and compassionate.
My comfort read
Not only are the stories comforting – far from it – but I also read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. There is joy in knowing that every story, as Philip Larkin describes the poem, is a good way of communicating to help you.
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