feminish

Once upon a time I shared a rickety east-London house with five twenty-something lasses. We were each broke, in debt and buried by bookshelves (old stacked-up empty wine-boxes from City merchants) twice the size of our wardrobes (cheap hanging rails from the fashion market). It felt oddly voyeuristic to browse the others’ books… I knew that mine were a catalogue of hopes (things I wanted to know), guilts (things I wished I knew already) and dreamlands I wanted to escape into. A bit like an underwear draw, really.

I remember vividly the white-spined snoopy comics packing-out the front room, the silver-blue oxford classics stacked along the dresser, and the postmodern Introducing… series brimming out of the bathroom fireplace. But I browsed and thumbed only hesitantly and sheepishly.

What luck, then, that there’s such things as Book Memes. And that friends, if you ask them nicely, can be persuaded to divulge the deepest secrets of their bookworlds. Because it’s one thing to see the creased and worn silver-blue spines, but quite another to know what they’ve meant.

This, then, is the first guest book meme. From the Princess of Pub Quizzes (she can petition me for another name anytime)…..

One book that changed your life

My usual answer to this question is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which I read when I was 16 and which moved me deeply with its poetic meditation on aestheticism and the continued need for engagement with the mess of life. However, it would be, I suppose, a dull meme if Hesse swept the board so I offer instead Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which I came across at around the same time and read in the space of a single train journey. It’s a difficult thing to classify - it’s at once fiction, history and philosophy - but it felt as though I was less reading it than it was reading me - stripping away all of my assumptions about reality and humanity and forcing me to re-evaluate everything around me. I sincerely felt as I finished it that I had become a different and, I hoped, more sensitive person. It stays with me fifteen years on as an increasingly nebulous sense memory, since I’m scared to revisit it, but an immensely precious one nonetheless.

One book you have read more than once

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read this; it’s the ultimate comfort book for me and I’ll often pick it up to read a few pages when

I’m feeling a bit miserable and find myself still engrossed, and feeling far happier, an hour or so later. I can’t intellectually justify its place in my life - it’s a straightforward middle-brow rites of passage novel about a young woman who becomes involved with the eccentrically bohemian family of one of her university lecturers, and people with whom I’ve shared it have found it tediously smug and irritatingly middle-class, neither of which charges I can easily refute. I don’t, however, care a jot for criticisms of it - I love every one of the characters, who seem real and vivid to me, and I find it emotionally thoroughly fulfilling. My battered paperback copy is very few readings away from total disintegration, but when that sad day occurs I shall simply replace it and carry on where I left off.

One book you would want on a desert island

As a thoroughly urban and cosseted individual, I think anything practical would merely be postponing the inevitable and so I’m not going to bother suggesting it. Instead - and I apologise in advance for the dreadful cliché - a complete Shakespeare would, I think, last me the longest. I do feel that that’s an awfully dull thing to say but I can’t think of any other single volume that could give so much; there’s so much life and wisdom and beauty sewn throughout the works that they’d forever remind me of all that I find the most inspiring. I’m not good at solitude, so anything that brings as much of the world and humanity as possible within its pages would be just the ticket. A complete Dickens would be an acceptable alternative but I don’t think I could lift it.

One book that made you laugh

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. A sprawling mess, a repellent but endlessly memorable hero and one of the most casually brilliant, elegaic and melancholy portraits of America ever written are all combined into this wonderful monstrosity of a book which is, I think, the only novel ever to have made me laugh at length - and to my huge embarrassment - on public transport.

One book that made you cry

This was really a tricky one, because there are so many. It’s the emotional response I crave the most from fiction, and one I find fairly easily evoked. To pick a recent one which has stayed with me, One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes. It’s a very simple novel written straight after the Second World War which follows a woman around her daily life in the course of a normal day and which did more than any history to bring home to me the reality of the conflict as it affected domestic life. It brings in the pain of living a life of such dreadful uncertainty, of random death, of lost partners and of a new society being forged painfully from the ruins of victory, which it combines with a wistful melancholy for a vanished world while nonetheless recognising that it had to be lost. It’s emotionally vivid, never crass or didactic and, for me, endlessly moving; I saw the leading character as my grandmother, whose husband was mortally wounded fighting in France, and the tears flowed through sadness and through love and admiration.

One book you wish had been written

The thoroughly contradictory ideal of a sacred text for humanism. Many of the people I most admire are in no way religious but they’re all clearly moral, upstanding and endlessly decent. They all have clear senses of right and wrong and I find their moral responses to the world all the more valuable because they aren’t motivated by any supernatural carrot and stick but by principles of humanity and the shared good of society. I wish there were something which codified their approach to life so that I could be enriched by it, and point others towards it, but by encapsulating it, one would inevitably destroy it since it gains its very value from the fact that it’s not a singular notion but is instead a dynamic shared set of experiences and responses.

One book you wish had never been written

Lots of ideas played around my head of philosophically damaging works or books which have been used to justify great evil (take your pick on that one) but they all seemed a little trite. So instead of going for a big one, I shall air a personal bugbear and say The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, which I thought was a simply vile book - nasty, brutish and, thankfully, short it substitutes grotesque excess and shock tactics for anything of emotional or literary value and seemed to me to be thoroughly devoid of any merit.

One book you are currently reading

1776 by David McCullough. I’ve always been interested by the birth of American democracy; it’s morbidly fascinating to see how something created with such noble ideals and such care has evolved into the bloated disaster of modern American governance. 1776 has a little too much military history for my taste - I can only care about so many details of troop movements - but as a biography of an emerging nation it reads very well.

One book you have been meaning to read

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie is just about my favourite living writer. Midnight’s Children is a stunning book with more fizzing wit and narrative invention in almost every paragraph than most writers can manage across a career. Most of the rest of his work is not far beneath that colossal achievement. I can’t imagine ever not at least intending to read anything new he writes. However, his penultimate novel, Fury, was, to my bemusement and distress, abysmal. It was hopelessly narcissistic, and felt thematically and narratively like merciless self-parody. I couldn’t finish it, and was appalled by the most sudden and precipitous decline in literary ability I’d ever witnessed. I want to read Shalimar the Clown, and I want it to be wonderful, but I’m scared. It’s far easier to keep procrastinating and put off the confirmation that his talent is lost forever.