My earliest reading memory
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes terrified me as a child. It’s the macabre story of how a young girl, Karen, is condemned to dance for ever as a punishment for wearing red shoes to church. She ends up having her feet chopped off to make the dancing stop. As someone who loves to dance, this made me desperately sad. I’ve been very wary of “fairy stories” ever since.
My favourite book growing up
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – it’s a wonderful love story and it was my grandmother’s favourite book when she was a child. She told stories of secretly climbing up into the hayloft to read it, her hems full of apples she’d scrumped from the orchard next door. I think I was especially drawn to the subtext that wit, warmth and courage can be more attractive than beauty.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I know it’s unlikely but … Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. We read it in French classes at school when I was about 16, and I was totally captivated by the idea of the magical lost house, and the overwhelming atmosphere of sadness and loss. Visiting Paris with my best friend and her mother to see the exact spot where the author first saw and instantly fell in love with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, who inspired the character of Yvonne de Galais in the book, opened my eyes to a whole new world – Rodin, the poetry of Jacques Prévert (and weirdly La Vache Qui Rit cheese, which seemed impossibly exotic to me in 1977).
The writer who changed my mind
Until I read Robert Macfarlane’s magisterial Underland, just a few years ago, I wasn’t much interested in what lies beneath the earth. If I thought about it at all, I certainly had no idea that it could be at least as awe-inspiring as what lies above it. Macfarlane also has a wonderful way of putting things into geological perspective: 100,000 years ago, rivers ran across the Sahara; in around 5bn years, “the Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel”.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. What 13-year-old girl wouldn’t want to be Jo March?
The book I reread
Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, with its five different voices, has me coming back time and again. I love the multilayered narrative structure and I reread it for the sheer joy of such exquisite writing – each sentence can be rolled in the mouth and savoured. I find myself identifying more closely with a different character every time.
The book I discovered later in life
I’ve only recently got to know the poetry of the 19th-century poet John Clare, and have been reading it as part of researching my new book on the politics and literature of England. He has this brilliant grasp of the idea that nature is an essential and indivisible part of our own being. And, remarkably, he seems to anticipate the findings gathered over the following 150 years of ecological insight.
The book I am currently reading
Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge. It’s fascinating to gain an insight into the story of how recent Conservative and coalition governments worked (or didn’t) from someone on the inside – and to discover a former Tory minister who clearly found Westminster every bit as dysfunctional as I do.
My Comfort Read
It’s a toss up between Mary Oliver’s poetry, with its sense of the infinite possibilities of every moment; Emily Dickinson (whom I have finally realised with relief that I don’t need to fully understand in order to love), and any of the tender and wise Lucy Barton books by the amazing Elizabeth Strout.