What book…
…are you reading now?
I’M always reading more than one thing! So… first of all I’m absolutely gripped by Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird. I actually started out reading the third Highway 59 book by Attica Locke (Guide Me Home) – I was on the Book Off podcast with Attica and I wanted a sense of who I was going to be talking to.
The book was amazing, but then I realised it was the third rather than the first, so I went back to the beginning.
I’m also reading Henrik Meinander’s The History Of Finland. That may not sound like an absolute rollercoaster but, as it turns out, Scandinavia has some deep, strange stories to tell.
For the joy of villainy I’ve got Drew Hayes’s Chilling Reflections.
…would you take to a desert island?
I’M awarding myself the kind of island where you don’t need a survival manual, so I’ll take Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden Of Evening Mists.
It’s a superb book and I’m pretty sure I could read it for years. If I can sneak a copy of Rivers Solomon’s new one in my sock, I’ll do that too. I hear it’s absolutely dazzling – but I don’t think it’s arrived yet (or have I misplaced it?) Exactly when am I getting stuck on this island?
…first gave you the reading bug?
LORD Of The Rings is the first thing I remember reading to myself as a proper book, when I was seven.
I sat in my bedroom in Cornwall, listening to the gales come in around the house, and just read it and read it.
Later on, when we lived in London, I used to go to the bookshop and read anything from the science fiction and fantasy shelves.
That was a pretty mixed bag but, along the way, I picked up William Gibson’s Neuromancer and I’ve never stopped reading him.
…left you cold?
GREAT Expectations by Charles Dickens. I had to read it at school and I have never been so completely disengaged by anything.
I came back to it recently and, of course, it’s irritatingly good – there’s a reason Dickens gets so much attention – but I still don’t really like it.
So much in the way we respond to books is about personal experience and that has to be allowed. If the combination of a good book with a good person is a misfire, that’s OK. No one gets hurt.
KARLA’S Choice by Nick Harkaway and John le Carré (Viking, £22) is out now.
This post was originally published on here
