My earliest reading memory
The first book I read by myself, rather than at my mother’s proverbial knee, was The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne. I was around six and I’m fairly sure it was on loan from my teacher, Miss Meade, as our house contained no books other than the Bible. I remember nothing of the plot, but I do recall the vivid sense of a Pacific landscape that it brought to our little prefab in Cowdenbeath, the sense of a wonderful elsewhere, untainted by coal dust or smoke.
My favourite book growing up
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Naturally, Alice herself bored me, but the other characters felt like the friends and neighbours I should have had, rather than the people I did know. It took me some time to realise that, secretly, some of the dull folk in my workaday world were actually members of that divine cast of lunatics, and were doing their damnedest to hide it. My music teacher was definitely a White Knight, one of our priests was a Mock Turtle and, for a while there, the love of my life bore a striking resemblance to the Cheshire Cat.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series. My stoner friends were into Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but that didn’t interest me. What Peake created was darker, more intricate, at once more sinister and more beautiful than anything else I had read up to that point. At the end, I was left with a powerful impression of the richness of language, of its magical power. As my father would say, “people like us” didn’t become writers, (or musicians, or artists) but Peake made me wonder if writing was maybe worth the risk of honourable failure.
The book that made me want to be a writer
John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, which I read in my early 20s. What beguiled me was its scope, the way it drew pagan magic from the land in a mix of history, myth and a contemporary narrative that nobody else, to my mind, had even attempted. Of course I knew, even then, it was inimitable, but imitation was never the point: what mattered was to find a way to be equally inimitable, or nearly so. Clearly, this is still a work in progress for me.
The book I reread
Rimbaud’s Illuminations, once or twice a year. Hard to say why: there are poetry collections that I like more; but I think it reminds me that, with the right balance of caution and openness, a writer can dare to be visionary.
The book I could never read again
Pretty much anything by Ernest Hemingway. I was something of a fan in my 20s, and I still enjoy the early stories, but the novels now seem mannered and self-limiting. How his editors could have exposed Across the River and Into the Trees to the cruel light of day seems astonishing to me now, while For Whom the Bell Tolls is, quite literally, a laugh-out-loud disaster.
The book I am currently reading
Kay Redfield Jamison’s wonderful Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind, a book about healing that, drawing on the lives and work of figures as diverse as WHR Rivers and Paul Robeson, should make us all think again about mental illness, the profession of psychiatry, and how we heal ourselves and others.
My comfort read
1066 and All That by WC Sellar. No matter how often I go back to it, I always find something to make me laugh.
• John Burnside was the winner of the 2023 David Cohen prize for literature in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement.
