The book I am currently reading
I’m rereading A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It’s a ferocious, atmospheric, wonderfully written book, with vast, fearless scope, and I’m blown away by the expertise with which he brings to life a dozen vivid and completely distinct voices.
The book that changed my life
I blame my career choice on my dad reading me The Wind in the Willows when I was five or six. I can still remember hearing him read the sentence “Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal …” That was when it hit me what words can do.
The book I wish I’d written
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. He creates a whole world and lets us wander around it. And the writing is stunning. “Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch, whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many another seaman, clearly and near to him speaks from the bedroom of her dust … Remember her. She is forgetting. The earth which filled her mouth is vanishing from her.” If I wrote anything that perfect, I’d be a happy writer for ever.
The book that influenced my writing
Probably Mystic River by Dennis Lehane and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. They brought it home to me that the supposed boundary between literary and genre fiction is complete bollocks, that you don’t have to choose either gripping plots or thematic depth and beautiful writing and intricate characterisation – you can have them all.
The book I think is most overrated
I must be missing something, because I cannot see the point of DH Lawrence’s Women in Love. He’s clearly blown away by his own wonderfulness in being so incredibly daring and shocking, but any daring that’s in there is buried by the affected writing and the vibe of self-congratulation. To borrow from my mother-in-law: if he was ice-cream, he’d lick himself to death.
The book that changed my mind
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I read it as a teenager, and it changed my assumption that Richard III had the Princes in the Tower killed – but it also changed the way I see history. It made me realise that the history we’re given is selective, it’s skewed, it’s reshaped over time to fit various shifting narratives and agendas. I’m a lot more careful about checking sources – not just for history, but for news – since I read that book.
The last book that made me cry
The ending of Watership Down gets me every time.
The last book that made me laugh
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, a short, smart discussion of artificial intelligence by Janelle Shane. Her AI’s efforts to come up with recipes cracked me up. The title is its idea of a chat-up line.
The book I couldn’t finish
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It’s beautifully written, with a slowly building atmosphere of unease and eerieness. About a third of the way in, I got spooked enough that my husband gently suggested that maybe I should put the book away. I still really want to go back to it, but now doesn’t seem like the right time.
The book I give as a gift
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. I love the breadth of imagination, the joy with which Chabon juggles language, the way he can make a character leap off the page with one perfect phrase, the way he switches effortlessly from laugh-out-loud funny to unsettling to deeply moving.
My earliest reading memory
Making my dad read me Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss yet again, so he would get his tongue in a knot.
My comfort read
I’ve been rereading a lot of Agatha Christie. Right now I want a world where I know that the crisis will end, good and bad will be neatly sorted out and put where they belong, and somehow everyone will move on without being particularly traumatised by anything that’s happened. My favourite is Sleeping Murder, for the haunting atmosphere.
• Tana French’s The Searcher is published by Viking (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
October 30, 2020 at 05:00PM
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Tana French: 'I cannot see the point of DH Lawrence’s Women in Love' - The Guardian
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