The Pleasure of Reading by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408859636
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

My favourite books

Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz; The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez; Ariel, Sylvia Plath; The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R. L. Stevenson; The White Goddess, Robert Graves; Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles; The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.

Tom Stoppard

I was never a precocious reader. In his Unreliable Memoirs Clive James remembers, or thinks he does, how certain of his schoolmates, on being asked what they had been reading in the holidays, would come up with James Joyce while Clive himself would confess to Biggles in the South Seas. This was pretty much my own experience except that as far as I know none of us had read James Joyce.

There was a library on the troopship which brought us from India when I was eight. From the way I tried to divine the contents of the books purely from their physical appearances, with no sense of authors or titles, I would guess that I had read little or nothing before then. My mother qualifies this with her own memory of the two of us planning to have a bookshop together, but in that regard all I can recall is buying the Dandy and Beano in the shop near the Capital Cinema in Darjeeling.

The first real book I read was Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome. By ‘real book’ I mean a book which looked like a proper grown-up book, 300 or more pages of solid text. I was quite surprised to discover that such an intimidating object could turn out to be gripping stuff. This was a few weeks after I arrived in England. I didn’t ‘know about books’. I noticed from the flyleaf of Peter Duck that the author had written other books, and my method of searching for these books had a sort of dim pathos about it; I simply went around picking up any book I saw lying about to see if it was called Swallows and Amazons. But it never was.

However, Peter Duck broke the dam and when I arrived at my English prep school I started reading books in sets – the collected Arthur Ransome, Richmal Crompton, Captain W. E. Johns, and the usual classics – The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, The Coral Island, Stalky And Co., Three Men in a Boat. I would say that my reading was utterly conventional except in its voracity. I was the apocryphal child who read the sauce bottle and the cornflakes packet if there was nothing else to hand, and for years afterwards I simply wouldn’t contemplate getting on a bus without something to read, to the point, once when I was in my late teens, of spending my bus fare on a second-hand book (I still have it: Walter Winchell by St Clair McKelway), preferring the devil of hitchhiking to the deep blue sea of enduring half an hour bookless.

The collected works of Dornford Yates bridged me between schools, and

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