My earliest reading memory
The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. I was probably four or five, and I read it with my mother in my parents’ bedroom. I still remember the drawings today as if I were back in the safety of childhood.
My favourite book growing up
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. I read a lot of horror and SF and fantasy when I was a kid but placing vampires in a recognisable and completely realistic world was singularly terrifying, and I went back again and again.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I read it in my early teens the night before we were going to discuss it in an English class – and then read it immediately again. After staying up all night, I realised the possibilities of the novel and there was no going back to the books of my childhood. It was a before-and-after experience.
The writer who changed my mind
The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who pulled me out of the burgeoning middlebrow world of my youth and showed me how trash and pop could also be invigorating and vital art and nothing to feel guilty about.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. After I read this collection of essays I understood what a sentence could do. It was the book through which I discovered how style and voice sells everything – style and voice is the meaning.
The author I came back to
Charles Dickens, who I was taught way too young – who gives a 12-year-old David Copperfield? I had other painful experiences with him when I was a teenager. I came back to Dickens in my late 40s and was stunned by the scope and genius and the pure readability of his greatest work.
The book I reread
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, every 10 years or so, ever since I first read it in high school. It feels different each time and keeps reaffirming itself as the key American novel of the 20th century.
The book I could never read again
Probably something by Robert Ludlum, whose mammoth super-violent bestselling thrillers from the 1970s were a staple with my father (The Gemini Contenders, The Holcroft Covenant) and later with me – dense, tightly plotted, often gory, cinematic. I was fascinated then but picked one up a couple of years ago and could barely get through a chapter. Plot isn’t enough.
The book I discovered later in life
Well, there are many of them but one of the most profound was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth – I have no idea why I hadn’t come to it earlier. It seems that everyone I know had read it decades ago and I only discovered it in my 50s.
The book I am currently reading
World’s Fair by EL Doctorow. I bought it in 1985 and found it when I was cleaning out the library at my mother’s house – it was one of those rare hardbacks that for some reason had never been cracked. I’m also reading Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. I have never connected more intimately with a book about movies – we’re the same age and our childhood moviegoing experiences are almost identical.
My comfort read
David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. I can open it at any page and become completely immersed in it. The first time I read it was a profound education. The hundreds of times I’ve flowed through it – or parts of it – have been pure pleasure. I agree as often as I disagree with his takes on movies, directors and actors, but it’s always informative and completely transporting.
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