A Profile, in Books

My first favourite books were science fiction. The Christmas I was twelve my mother gave me John Wyndham's "The Chrysalids." I spent the day curled up in a wing chair reading and it was possibly the best Christmas ever. That spring I read "House of Stairs" compulsively, five times over, finishing and then starting over at the beginning again. By summer I was biking to the library and carrying home stacks of books at a time. Later, in my teens, it would be the more sustaining and longer reading novels of Stephen King – "Pet Sematary" and "Cujo" and "The Gunslinger."

At the same time as this, throughout my teens, I read "The Outsiders" six times, luxuriating in it. In high school I had the same English teacher three years in a row and she introduced me to the classics. I read "Wuthering Heights" – a novel of brooding sexuality without a single sex scene – in three days while sick in bed with a fever. I ended my high school literary consumption with "The House of Mirth," a novel that haunted me for years, its tragedy suited to eighteen year olds on the cusp of anxious adulthood.

I read many books in university, but none affected me the way these earlier ones had. It wasn't until I was settled into my career and working too many hours that any books wound themselves inside me the way they had when I was a teen. I was twenty-four when I began to read about twenty-six year old Christopher Tietjens in "Parade's End." It begins "The two young men – they were of the English public official class – sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage." The novel was like a lozenge for my soul, hours of soothing a kind of existential pain at what adulthood was turning out to be.

The best Saturday night of that period was the one I gave to reading "The Age of Innocence." Nothing at that time could be better than escaping from the outer world and delving into a place where duty and appearance trumped authenticity, a powerful reflection perhaps – more powerful than I knew at the time – of what my working life, the career that took all my life blood, was to me.

It would be a decade before books wound into me again after that, and then it was Lionel Shriver's "Double Fault" and "We Need to Talk about Kevin," books of darkness and frustration on a monumental level.

Then there were years of gentle and carefully held in peacefulness, a time devoted to photography and rock climbing at a local gym, and travel, but not to books. Perhaps we always need pain, or a kind of existential surprise, to open us up. Years later, I read Nancy Mitford's "The Pursuit of Love" when I was damped down on painkillers and facing the potential loss of one eye. I was waiting, very placidly. I was looking for something light and fluffy. But "The Pursuit of Love" was so much better than that. "There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes . . ."

I found "The Sun Also Rises" in a second hand bookstore. I had no expectations, having read Hemingway before, but here I felt such tenderness for such very human faults and pain.

And then, lastly, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Again, I expected something light and found something much darker, and harder and true, and ultimately more satisfying.