5 Books That Define Me
I am going to assume you have done your background reading and found out about the intimate details of my formative years on the About page.
Of course, the events catalogued therein will explain a lot about my writing - but writers are shaped not just by what they go through (in reality or in their imagination) but also by what they read. This first blog post is a shopping list of books that have shaped how I talk, how I think, how I write. I have read these books so often that they have become part of me.
1. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters – Julian Barnes
Although the whole book is great, what I keep re-reading is the half chapter on love. I have changed my mind about the veracity of many of Julian Barnes’s thoughts on love over the years and formed many ideas of my own, but I will never change my mind about the utter beauty of the way this tiny chapter, ‘Parenthesis’, is written. I want my writing to have this gentle insightfulness, to be as lofty and yet as conversational as this.
2. Blessed City – Gwen Harwood
This book is neither well-known nor easy to acquire, but it is so worth it. Australian poet Gwen Harwood was 22 years old and living with her parents in Brisbane, Australia, when she wrote these charming, hilarious and moving letters to her friend Lieutenant Tony Riddell. Her love of music, her longing to capture the world in words and her delight in causing chaos at the bizarre government office where she worked all endeared her to me and it is a book I keep coming back to.
3. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I have read this in French, Dutch and English and it is superb in any language. Sweet, but sad, and so full of wisdom. There is little I can compare this story to: it is funny and allegorical; it is wistful, poetic, simple and yet deep.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
4. White Noise – Don DeLillo
White Noise is an extraordinary story about everything that is painfully ordinary. Although my tastes usually run more towards the lyrical, there is something intensely pleasing about Don DeLillo’s very clean, unadorned sentences. They are short. They say what they mean. They stand. And yet, I need to take a while to think about every page, because there is so much depth beneath his very straight-forward prose.
5. Angels and Men – Catherine Fox
I love Catherine Fox’s novels so much that a friend made me a meme about how often I re-read her books. Should I be worried? No, I should not. Her writing is so witty and so perfect that I never get tired of it. In Angels and Men, a snarky, sullen post-grad still suffering from recent traumatic events was hoping for a year of hiding away in her room studying. However, the people around her just won’t leave her alone and she finds friendship and love despite her best efforts to avoid them.
6. The Benefits of Passion – Catherine Fox
Where Mara in Angels and Men is reticent, anti-social and often abrasive, Annie in The Benefits of Passion is bursting with abundant humour and personality hidden under layers of charity shop clothes. She is an endearing contradiction, with her wicked imagination and yet apologetic fear of conflict. This novel is if possible even more hilarious than Fox’s first and vast swathes of it have just become part of my everyday vocabulary. Best of all, it contains a novel-within-a-novel, which the main character is writing on the sly during boring lectures. 100% relatable content.