Newcastle University

What would you say books mean for you? How important a part do they play in your life?

Reading and other people’s writing is absolutely central, key. I think anyone who knows me would associate me with books. […] And I’m not precious, but what I do struggle with, is, I saw a friend on Saturday, and she has – she’s very eminent in her field, but she’s spent the last thirty years in the antiquarian book trade in London, and now she’s set up on her own. And what has always grieved me slightly is the book as a commodity…she loves reading, she loves books, she was reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch on Saturday – and that’s something else, I’ll always know what books my friends are reading, and they will always know what I’m reading, because at the beginning of a conversation it’s always ‘and what are you reading at the moment?’ – but I know that my friend will have customers who are really excited because they’ve got the first edition of Under the Volcano, and you know, they’re never gonna read it, but it’s an investment, and it’s a commodity, and they might sell it next year. And I know that’s the real world, and I don’t want to be kind of pious about it, but that’s always seemed to me a bit odd. But the idea of books as commodities and investment, and even as sentimental objects … there are books that I look at, like my favourite book, which is a very close thing, is actually – the Malcolm Lowry would sort of be there on its own – but as an artefact it’s Doctor Zhivago. I remember seeing that film when I was quite young and being incredibly – and again, it’s the Russian thing – being incredibly overpowered by it, and I can remember buying a secondhand copy of Doctor Zhivago in a secondhand bookshop in Hertford, and reading it,and I read it every year, deliberately, for about six or seven years. I’ve still got that edition – it is absolutely falling to bits, and I guess I’m contradicting myself, because I’m quite sentimental about that. I can remember where I bought it, how important that book was to me. And of course now, with my other reading, particularly non-fiction stuff and my travelling into Russia, I have a better understanding now of Pasternak and what that book meant, and why he wrote it as he did and so on. It was just a great love story – a love story with a political edge to it, which is how I saw it then.