Friday, December 31, 2021

Books that made me / Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’

Kamila Shamsie: ‘I wish I’d written Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone.’ Photograph: Sophia Spring

Books

that

made me

Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’

The author of Home Fire on how she was transported by Midnight’s Children and by a flying car – and why she turns to Michael Ondaatje for comfort

Kamila Shamsie
Sat 20 Jan 2018 10.00 GMT

The book that changed my life
A novel called All Dogs Go to Heaven by Beth Brown, which I read when I was 11, and which persuaded my best friend and me to co-write a novel about our (recently departed) pet dogs. I haven’t stopped writing novels since.

The book I wish I’d written
At the moment it’s Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone.

The book that influenced me
Midnight’s Children made me see, aged 15 in Karachi, that there was a place in English language fiction for the kind of world I was growing up in.

The book that is most underrated
Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days. I read it at 16, the perfect age to be truly shaken by a book. At that time there were so few books set in Pakistan written in English that the sense of the world immediately around me felt new and thrilling.

And overrated
For years I said it was Heart of Darkness, which I first read at university and found dense and tedious. A few years ago I reread it, and it was brilliant; I’ve been too chagrined to call anything “most overrated” since.

The book that changed my mind
In the season of Brexit and Trump I thought “optimism” in novels equated to “false comfort”. Ali Smith’s Autumn and Winter made me reconsider that.

The last book that made me cry
Stefan Merrill Block’s Oliver Loving. Its subject matter – a young man in a coma after a school shooting, and the repercussions for his family – lends itself to tears, but the novel’s real accomplishment is to avoid pulling heartstrings.

The book I couldn’t finish
The first book I didn’t finish was Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The more of it I read, the more I felt I was failing it as a reader. So I stopped. Since then I’ve become too cavalier about giving up on books partway through.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read
I’m pretty shameless about the holes in my reading life, but the only new year’s resolutions I ever make are around unread books. I had “read War and Peace” as a resolution for approximately 17 years before actually getting down to it, and wondering what took me so long. Middlemarch by comparison was a mere eight years on the list.

The book I give as a gift
Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket.

My earliest reading memory
Looking at a page of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with an illustration of a wondrous car, and knowing that on that page is the sentence “and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flew over their heads and into the sky ...”

My comfort read
I dip in and out of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion whenever in need of comfort or solace. They’re old, known friends now, and like the best friends they can still surprise you in lovely ways.

THE GUARDIAN