My Literary Top 10
Maggie Gee |
|  | 1 | Best short story I re-read recently: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’. Everything happens under the surface, but it is heart-breaking, finally, and you have to read it again at once as comprehension dawns. A perfect use of the form. | | 2 | Book I finished reading but wanted my time back afterwards I never regret finishing a book. I only regret the ones I left half-finished. At least if you complete the experience, you can judge it properly. | | 3 | What I would blush to be seen reading on the tube Why would I blush about anything I read? I’ve earned the right to read whatever I like. Maybe I should be embarrassed to be seen reading the National Enquirer, but I’m not, and I do. | | 4 | Best ‘film of the book’ I've seen Howard’s End. Rich, sympathetic, eccentric book; patiently moving, beautifully acted film. And the film of Girl with a Pearl earring is even better than Tracy Chevalier’s very good book. | | 5 | Best recent novel in verse Bernardine Evaristo’s dancing, witty The Emperor’s Babe, set in Roman London but written in a wonderfully readable, fluent mixture of 21st century slang and tags of Latin. | | 6 | Most embarrassing author photo I am going to tell you about the author photo on my first novel, Dying in Other Words. I was horribly poor, working weekends as a hotel receptionist off Baker Street, and the publishers asked me for a jacket photo. I went with all my diamanté on (which was a lot) to the photo booth at Euston, and sent the stoned-looking, starry result to my publisher. I told them it was by the society photographer, ‘U.Stone-Booth’, and that is how it appears on the jacket. | | 7 | Most famous author I’ve met who acted like a prat Jack Higgins (The Eagle Has Landed) name-dropped endlessly on a panel I saw him on 20 years ago. BUT the other writers on the panel were more ‘literary’ than him, and they were not being very nice to him, so in retrospect I think he was probably doing it out of insecurity. The literary world is a snobbish and snide one (viz this question.) Popular authors probably comfort themselves by saying ‘People read us, not those miserable buggers.’ | | 8 | My favourite bookshop It’s a tie between all my locals: the Willesden Bookshop (next to the Library), the Kilburn Bookshop (opposite Kilburn High Road BR) — both have cheery, informative staff who are passionate about books — and the excellent, brand new Queen’s Park Books, Salusbury Road, where my beloved daughter works on Saturdays. | | 9 | Author I’d like to see win more awards: Me Though festivals, journalists etc often refer to me as ‘award-winning’, and I rarely contradict them, I have never actually won one, and I wouldn’t want there to be an oversight… | | 10 | Author I’d like to see beaten with a stick, then never again The question is funny, but to answer it isn’t. |
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