An Interview with Philip Pullman
My collection stretches back to my childhood. I can date it more or less precisely: I still have the book I took out of our family bookshelf when, at the age of eight, we set off to sail from London to Australia (and of course I don’t mean sail, I mean go by sea, that being the usual mode of long-distance transport in the 1950s). The book was a selection of the poems of Longfellow, including a lot of Hiawatha, which I read with avidity. I don’t know why I chose that book: I suppose I wanted to impress people.
I started buying books … well, as soon as I had enough money. Relatives used to give me book tokens as birthday presents, and if I won a prize at school it would usually be a book. I remember borrowing Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar from the mobile library when I was … what would I have been? About fifteen, I suppose. I was so taken with its mixture of what seemed very grown-up sophistication and sensuality that I promptly bought Mountolive and Clea from the local W. H. Smith’s, that being the closest thing to a bookshop in the part of north Wales where we lived. My uncle contributed Justine, which he’d bought and not liked very much, and I still have that set of the once highly celebrated Alexandria Quartet. Reading it now, it’s not hard to see why it went out of literary fashion; but it’s not hard, either, to see why it was perfect reading for the sort of teenager I once was. I don’t believe in dissing books I used to love, and I always suspect the moral judgment of people who sneer at the taste of the reader they used to be: “I know thee not, old book.”
There’s never been a phase in my life when books were not important, and nor has there been a time when I stopped reading. It’s almost as important as breathing.
The top ten was rather hastily assembled. I stand by it, but of course if I’d had longer to think about it I would have chosen slightly differently, no doubt. There are four books that would remain, I think. One is the famous Donald Allen anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. I have a modern edition, but the one I saw first (when I was sixteen) exploded all my ideas of what poetry was and could be. I did have ideas about that, because another of my top ten, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, accompanied me everywhere for two or three teenage years. It was the most popular British anthology of verse, the embodiment of traditional taste, which meant that all the famous poems were there. I loved them, and I still do. But The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 knocked that all into exhilarating, intoxicating, inspiring, enthralling confusion and showed me new colors and new sounds and new forms of delight. Ginsberg’s Howl: how could I forget my first encounter with that? And it was Ginsberg who led me to William Blake, hence my battered little paperback Selected: another inexhaustible and much-loved companion, and perhaps the one I would grab if a fire, et cetera.
My shelves are made of wood. We moved to this house eight years ago, because we thought that at last we’d have room for all our books. No chance! Of making many books there is no end, as the Bible remarks somewhere. I had a lot of bookshelves made to cover every suitable wall, and before a year was up they were all filled, and piles of books were covering the floor. Every time I go into town I accidentally buy two or three books. Publishers bombard me with books they want a puff for. Foreign editions of my own books crowd in from all over the world like eels making for the river where they were spawned.
Arrangement: when we first moved here I paid my younger son to arrange the books in my downstairs “study.” He has a librarian’s mind, and his arrangement held good until so many more books arrived that they just swamped the categories and burst the banks of the subject headings. Now it’s just memory and guesswork that guide me to this pile or that shelf or that corner of the floor. I’m often delightfully surprised by a book I’d totally forgotten.
When I’m working on something, I keep the most useful and relevant books near me on the table where I work. The most important book of all (the fourth unremovable from my top ten) is my much-repaired 1959 edition of Chambers. It’s the right size for one hand to pick up. Dictionaries have got bigger and bigger, unnecessarily, it seems to me. I like Chambers because of its pawky wit. Sometimes a definition will unexpectedly snap at you, as for example double-locked: locked by two turns of the key, as in very few locks but many novels.
Books unphotographed: there are cookery books in the kitchen—about three times as many as I use. I could cull those with no difficulty. Perhaps I shall. Phone books? Next to the phone. Pornography? No. On the bedside table I keep whatever thriller I’m currently reading in bed (at the moment, John Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy). I’ve been reading a lot of Lee Child recently. I like thrillers, and I read them unironically. James Lee Burke is astonishingly good.
How does the reading feed into the writing, and vice versa? Continually, continuously, promiscuously, in a million ways. Perhaps I’ll write about it in greater detail one day: a memoir in terms of books. It’s been done, before, of course, like everything else.
The Kindle: maybe we’re on the cusp of a revolution as great as Gutenberg’s, but then maybe we’re not. No invention was ever as great as the codex; it’s still unsurpassed. Reading the Kindle is sort of like reading a book, because there’s nothing else you can do on it: you can’t check your e-mails or look for the football results. No built-in distractions. And it’s also sort of like reading a book because the text is arranged in sort of pages. It’s much less easy to navigate through, though, and they just haven’t got the hang of poetry yet: the formatting is all over the place. But the ability to take hundreds of books with you in one little slab of plastic! For traveling, for weekends away, and so forth! What a boon!
On the other hand, I mistrust any device whose continued usage depends on a vast, mysterious, and invisible infrastructure of electricity supply, computer servers, broadband connections, credit facilities, and so on. A printing press can exist and work in a room anywhere, with no electricity at all, and the paper and the ink and the bookbinding have a kind of artisanal comprehensibility, but the computer … When the big crash comes, I shall throw away my Kindle without a moment’s regret; but my books will last as long as I do. Have I got enough now to last the rest of my life? Could I get by without ever acquiring another? Oh, I think so. But I’m so looking forward to X’s biography of Y, and I must get that book of medieval Hebrew poetry I read about in the NYRB, and A was enthusing to me about B’s forthcoming novel, and I liked her last so much … So I’ll continue to fill the house with books, and never mind the consequences.
Occasionally I get rid of some. I’ll buy thrillers even if I know nothing about them, and sometimes I do and the writing is so bad I can’t bear to read more than a page; or there are the several dozen books in the Library of East Anglia series that a grateful publisher sent me because I wrote a few obliging paragraphs about his latest rediscovery; and it would be nice to keep one copy of the Thai edition of my fairy tales, but do I really need ten? So from time to time I go through and pick out everything I don’t want and take it to the charity shop. It’s only skimming the froth, though; I’m sure there are many lurking in the depths that I know I don’t want. But I never see them.
Ruthven Todd, ed. Blake
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Hergé The Castafiore Emerald
Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary
Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems, 1927–1979
Italo Calvino Italian Folktales
George Eliot Middlemarch
Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960
Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of Ballads
Francis Turner Palgrave, ed. The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language
