Newcastle University

Do you share and discuss your reading with others?

Unfortunately I’ve nobody really to discuss it with now. You mean a bookgroup? Yes, I have been in a bookgroup, and I decided to leave it, because I thought, well, I didn’t like the choice of books at all. It was far too … it was based on a public library, and I think the public library goes to the lowest common denominator. In fact, to me the choice was absolutely appalling. You very rarely read a good book. I was going to say never ever did it introduce me to an author I didn’t know, but it did once, actually – Marilynne Robinson. Yes, she is good, and has become quite, I don’t mean popular, but well known, and she only writes about one every ten years, doesn’t she? She has something to say. That was in the bookgroup. But partly, it’s just because I feel old and I can’t be bothered to turn out at night. I’m still in touch with those people, and in fact I’m going to their Christmas do next week. But I just had decided, for the sake of reading book that I didn’t really want to read anyway, that I would leave the group. And as regards friends, oh I miss that enormously. I mean, a great friend who died – we would always exchange news about books and what we’d each recently read. But there’s nobody now really that either has the time or the interest to be reading as much as I do, and reading all the current books. They might read one of them.