World Book Day: I’ll show you my books…
It’s World Book Day today. This means different things to different people. If you work in marketing for a publisher it means a ton of work for little measurable result. If you are a parent, it may well mean dressing your daughter as Hermione Granger again, and explaining to your son that ‘Angry Birds’ is neither a character from a book nor an achievable costume. If you are a heavy reader and general book person, it’s kind of like ‘International Keep Breathing Day’. If you aren’t a heavy reader and book person, you’re probably unaware that it’s World Book Day, and you may well be wondering what you’re doing on this blog. (You’re looking for Lord Magpie the folk band, or KJ Charles the rapper. No problem, mind how you go.)
Anyway, for those still here: It’s World Book Day, and here are some of my books.
Good Night Little ABC. I am 4, already a fluent reader. My mother gives me this book, a tiny alphabet hardback. Each animal has its adorable self-teddy.
I am charmed. Until I reach J.
I cry and cry. Poor Jasper Jabber Jay, forever alone, without his teddy. My mother tells me it’s alright. She assures me that his mummy is just outside the page, that she will come in and give him his teddy and everything will be fine again. I believe her. I realise the characters have life outside the page. I learn that I can add to the story.
Thirty-six years later I give my battered copy of this book to my four-year-old son. He leafs through the pages, delighted. Half way through, at J, he starts to cry, and I tell him what my mother told me, and he believes me too.
Roger Lancelyn Green’s Greek myths. I read them all, abridged, then unabridged. People mutate and change, murder, rape. I am maybe eight. I read them ragged, then I read his Robin Hood stories. Robin dies – not like Arthur or Achilles, not with a heroic death and some numinous sense that there will be resurrection: he dies alone, wounded, abandoned, without Marion. I cry. My mother tells me, ‘They’d all be dead by now anyway.’ This is quite remarkably unhelpful. I realise that sometimes stories don’t end the way you want them to. Sometimes they can’t be changed. I realise that I’m going to have to tackle some of this stuff myself. I’m growing up.
Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, Georgette Heyer. Everything, every word, over and over, taking apart the plotting, immersing myself in the perfectly crafted sentences. Setting the flame to what becomes a burning conviction that ‘genre’ fiction can outclass ‘literary’ fiction, and what matters is not the genre, not the classification into boxes because there’s magic or a happy ending, but the writing, the spirit, the style.
The Master and Margarita. I first read Mikhail Bulgakov’s anti-Stalinist masterpiece aged maybe 10. This is not because I am precocious. It is because I am desperate, having read close to everything in my small town library’s children’s book section. I am already devouring my parents’ shelves of Desmond Bagley and Alistair Maclean, so it seems perfectly natural to nip down to the adult section of the library. I pick up The Master and Margarita because it has a big black cat on the front. I read it bewildered and amazed and uncomprehending. I read it again. I read it maybe thirty times. I own three different translations. I go off boyfriends who refuse to read it. My mother calls it ‘The M&M test’. I learn about flaws and judgement and redemption from this book. I believe, with a teenage fire, that manuscripts don’t burn. I still believe that.
The Secret History. We are 21. We all read it with wild, disturbing enthusiasm. My friend says we will have a bacchanale. My boyfriend takes this a little too literally. The party does not go well. I do not speak to my friend for five years.
Bleak House. Immersing myself in Dickens, a whole term at Oxford with nothing else. Grotesquerie and sentiment, aspiration to kindness teamed with relentless, callous cruelty. I see Prunella Scales and Sam West at the National Theatre reading from Dickens, and I realise I should listen to him on audiobook forever because these are words that need to be read aloud. One day, I will.
There are others, thousands more. Single moments. My office passing round Behind the Scenes at the Museum like samizdat, sharing knowing nods when someone burst into tears: ‘we know what bit you’ve got to’. Marabou Stork Nightmares, the only book I have ever thrown in the bin. The Dark is Rising, a brilliantly pagan novel that I read every Christmas. ‘This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining…’ Reading A Fine Balance, in India on my honeymoon. (That could have used more thinking through.) And Bridge of Birds, where I turn for comfort. If you can read Miser Shen’s speech to his daughter in this marvellous, magical, life-enhancing book without tears, you probably need to have yourself reclassified as dead, or possibly concrete.
Those are some of my books. Feel free to tell me yours.
(I have just noticed that on the swear-to-God randomly selected spread of Good Night Little ABC, the animals’ names include ‘Crane’ and ‘Daniel’. Crane is the hero of my first published book. Daniel is the hero of Think Of England, coming in July. I am going to chalk that up to slightly disturbing coincidence, and not look further.)
What an evocative post .
World Book day I associate with dressing your child up in costume, and getting a £1.00 book token that you end up adding about £20.00 to as you and your child go out to spend it ” We still have my copies of Mary Poppins,, 101 Dalmatians and The New Moon with the Old all intact with my home made library cards in.
I remember a birthday party when I was 15, all my guests downstairs, me in my bedroom reading These Old Shades – a pattern of behaviour that has remained with me.
At 17 reading On the Road + Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and referring to my mother, for almost a year as a bourgeois hausfrau. And as you say, so many others ..
It’s not often that you take stock of how memories can be preserved through your reading life, thank you for reminding me.
There’s a wonderful, if sweary, blog and associated book called My Fucked Up Life in Books. You might well like it.
Just looked at it, I do.
loved The Greek myths by Roger Lancelyn Green too and the other book I really remembere falling in love with as a child was ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ by Rosemary Sutcliff. Have you read ‘Voss’ by Patrick White? If not I put in a plea for you to read it, I think you’d like it, it is one of my fav’s. White is a brilliant writer.
I haven’t, but will TBR it immediately. I welcome any suggestions for other people’s touchstone books.
Wonderful post, it’s amazing how vivid memories one has of reading the books that are transcendental. I have vivid recollections on myself reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, and just looking up from the book and looking around wondering if the world was actually changing or if was just me.
Love Master and Margherita. Love Russian literature in general there is a paper around somewhere that says about a third of my Bachelor’s is on that 🙂
Oh, man, 100 Years. Yes. Shivers down my spine.
Susie Saucer and Ronnie Rocket: my first romance ever. On a wet holiday somewhere, mummy reading us Grimble. Molesworth chiz. Endless Chalet School that we mocked even as we read them voraciously, Secret Seven smuggled home in schoolbags as contraband. Vanity Fair. I’d read and, dictionary constantly to hand, understood every single word, so I must have read the book, yes? Closed the cover impossibly proud but with no notion of what the story had been. Georgette Heyer, my mum’s solution to my having read the junior library dry – I had vivid dreams where ‘The Great Roxhythe’ miraculously appeared on the library shelves. Anne McCaffrey – I wanted a dragon for at least a year. First year at uni, I fell in love with Peter Wimsey, and decided that was the blueprint for my future relationship. Harry Potter 1., a book I’d loved as a child that I just hadn’t happened to read yet. And reading book 7 simultaneously with the children, each with our own copy, box of chocolates between us. The Vorkosigan books, because at some point Miles supplanted Peter in my affections.
ffotherington-tomas, wet and a weed. And I have *exactly* the same Chalet School experience. So ridiculous, so silly, give me another.
My Dad left me my first paperback book- 2s&6d – by my bed to wake up to- Jill’s Gymkhana / Ruby Ferguson the first of piles of pony books, and eventually the real things…beware early influences. After I had my son I was hormonally embarrassed, couldn’t bear adult books for at least a year and discovered Antonia Forrest’ s The Cricket Term and read and reread all the Arthur Ransome books. Sweet days indeed. Lovely blog thank you.
Antonia Forrest! Oh my God, I’d utterly forgotten those. The one where they play the roleplaying game, and it goes so wrong… Oh my goodness. /zooms off to stack up for the children/read herself/
I love it when yu get reminded of great books, Arthur Ransome awesome !
You’re dangerous to read on the tube. I was snorting with laughter at the Secret History bit – it turned me into the person people gather in their coats against. No matter – another excellent, enjoyable post.
Oh God that party. Everyone present still cringes at the memory, twenty years on.