Friday, October 9, 2020

Books that made me / Neil Gaiman / 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'

Neil Gaiman: ‘Tristram Shandy is a novel I approve of and keep meaning to read. I just haven’t read it.’ Photograph: Tim Knox/The Guardian

Books

that

made me

Neil Gaiman: 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'

The author on his friendship with Gene Wolfe, crying over Diana Wynne Jones and falling under the spell of CS Lewis

Neil Gaiman

Friday 9 October 2020

The book I am currently reading

The Invention of Jane Harrison by Mary Beard. I’m fascinated by Hope Mirrlees, and her relationship with Jane Harrison was one of the ingredients of her life. They collaborated on a book of translated Russian tales, and Harrison’s theories seem integral both to Paris, Mirrlees’s modernist poem and to Lud-in-the-Mist. I’m loving watching Mary Beard deconstruct and re-examine ideas about what biography is in this short but brilliant book. Also Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes. I’m reading it slowly and with delight, an essay at a time, rejoicing in the easy erudition and the way she upends what I thought I knew and gives me something much more interesting in its place.

The book that changed my life

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It’s brilliant, much more brilliant than I knew when I read it for the first time. I would not be the writer I am without Wolfe’s friendship, or without taking his lesson that you should write to be reread with increased pleasure by a smart reader.

The book I wish I’d written

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. It’s the great English fantasy novel, about the prosaic land next to the wilderness of Faerie. It’s a history and a murder mystery, and it’s about family and dissatisfaction, and about fairy fruit, which, as with all good fantasy, stands both for itself and for poetry, and sexuality, and the things that leave us changed forever.

The last book that made me laugh

Round the Horne Scripts by Marty Feldman and Barry Took. Où sont les neiges d’antan, Mr Horne? That’s your actual philosophical French.

The book that influenced my writing

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis. I read it when I was six, and fell in love with Narnia and with the magical story and most of all with the auctorial voice. Lewis seemed to be having a wonderful time writing, confiding in and treating the readers as if they were smart friends. It was the first time I was ever aware that there was a person behind the words. It made me want to write. It made me want to do that magic trick.

The last book that made me cry

Reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Dogsbody to my daughter Maddy, some 15 years ago. I got to the book’s end and we both had very wet faces.

The book I couldn’t finish

Titania Has a Mother by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon. I love much of their work, so was thrilled recently to find a book of theirs I didn’t know about. And a fairytale book at that. Let’s just say it was of its time and hadn’t aged well.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I’ve read extracts from it and loved them. It’s a novel I approve of and keep meaning to read. I just haven’t read it.

The book I give as a gift

A Humument by Tom Phillips. A Victorian novel, with pages painted over and into, messages and thoughts revealed and illuminated. It was always the book I gave people, hoping that even a few of them would read it and delight in it as I do.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

You don’t get to choose. Probably, you don’t get to be remembered, either. But most of my favourite authors are now unfashionable and forgotten, and I’d be happy to join their company, if every now and again someone found one of my books in a dusty pile and took comfort in it.

My earliest reading memory

A book about a little mermaid looking for other mermaids, and the inside front cover art from a Noddy book.

My comfort read

Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light feels like a place I can go where the people know me and will have to take me in, in a novel of people become gods.

• Pirate Stew by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell, is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99).

THE GUARDIAN