Friday, December 1, 2017

Books that made me / Penelope Lively / My debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce


Penelope Lively … the Beatrix Potter titles showed me the arresting use of language. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian


Books

that 

made me


Penelope Lively: my debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce

 The Booker prizewinner on why Beatrix Potter influenced her writing and how she was defeated by one of the greatest novels of the 20th century

 PENELOPE LIVERLY
FRIDAY 1 DECEMBER 2017

 The book that changed my life
Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece. I read it again and again when I was nine, 10, 11 – this is where I learned about story, and drama.

The book I wish I’d written

The Inheritors by William Golding: brilliantly imagined and infinitely sad.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

Many. But I have to cite the Beatrix Potter titles, which showed me the arresting use of language: “the dignity and repose of the tea party”; “roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce”; “the dinner was of eight courses, not much of anything, but truly elegant”.

The last book that made me cry

William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault. An exquisitely paced tragedy.

The most underrated book

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban captures an apocalyptic post-Holocaust world in fragmented language. It was highly regarded when it was published in 1980, but is rather forgotten now.

The book I couldn’t finish

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it is said, but I was defeated.


THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
2017
13 October 2017
Eimear McBride / ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’
20 October 2017
Shami Chakrabarti / ‘Harry Potter offers a great metaphor for the war on terror’
1 December 2017
Penelope Lively / My debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce

2018
20 January 2018
Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’
25 May 2018
Colm Tóibín / ‘I couldn’t read until I was nine / My first book was an Agatha Christie’
8 June 2018
Carol Ann Duffy / ‘I wish I’d written Harry Potter, obvs’
27 July 2018
Richard Powers: ‘I love sci-fi. The more 10-foot reptilians, the better’
28 september 2018
Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

2019

18 January 2019
Margaret Drabble / ‘Lee Child does all the things I could never do. I’m awestruck’

1 February 2019
Leïla Sliman / ‘I’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn Monroe'

8 February 2019
Emma Glass / ‘Game of Thrones is overrated. Give me The Lord of the Rings any day'

1 March 2019
Tom Rachman / ‘Does every author read faster than I do?’

8 March 2019
Ben Okri / ‘I began Don Quixote as one person and finished as another’

2020

17 April 2020
Sally Rooney / 'I want the next thing I do to be the best thing I’ve ever done'

1 May 2020
Edna O'Brien / 'Reading Charles Darwin dislodged my religious education'

24 May 2020
André Aciman: 'I couldn’t finish Moby-Dick. I lacked the patience'

9 October 2020
Neil Gaiman / 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'


2021
26 March 2021
Vivian Gornick / 'I couldn’t finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming'
9 April 2021
Emma Cline / ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’

6 August 2021

Damon Galgut / ‘After reading Roald Dahl, the world never looked the same’

9 August 2021
Frank Cottrell-Boyce / ‘I read Adrian Mole every year, it gets funnier each time’

13 August 2021
Anuk Arudpragasam / ‘There’s a lot of laughter in my life, but not when I read’

Posted by at
Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)