Rekindling Past Romances

Recently I have been mostly reading. I set myself a task, to reread important books. Special, memorable, magical ones. The ones that stayed in my brain. Some worked, some didn’t. 
 

I started with C.S Lewis’s ‘The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe’. This was the first book I ever re-read. I read it out-loud with my Mum and then I read it cover to cover in a day on a beach. My bucket and spade were discarded; instead I filled the pages with sand and imagined myself in snow. I loved the magical characters, talking animals and Aslan, half God-beast, half jolly good fellow. The whole premise of a world through a hole has captivated me ever since. 
  

And so on to Lewis Caroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, which upsettingly was less engaging. This extraordinary story inspires me often, so I replaced the read with a watch of Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion adaptation, a fantastic taxidermic nightmare:
 

Scarlett Thomas’s ‘Our Tragic Universe’ came next. The warmth and familiarity of her first-person narrative and resonance of her themes made me sure she must be a misplaced friend or someone I knew writing under a pseudonym when I first read her work. Alas, Google made me see she is real. I love her mixture of reality and magic. Her protagonist may be a witch and stumbles across a version of Tom Bombadil just like the hobbits did, but still has to worry about bills and boyfriends.
 

Jon McGregor’s ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable things’ has a breath-taking style. It’s like poetry melted into prose. The story is brilliant too, how the two strands gel and how incredibly moving it is. The Kafkan lack of names. The sparkle of sad selfless magic. 
 

Arthur Bradford’s 'Dog Walker'. Best short story writer ever. Tiny men, singing dogs, Cat Face. Tell me, what’s not to love? It’s a terrible thing that it’s out of print. Buy it!  
 

I was slightly frightened of picking up William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’ I’d tried to reread it once before and found it too bleak. But it was beautiful this time. The language, the characters, the structure – oh my! I felt like I was there. I could smell Addie’s corpse, I could see the circling buzzards, I could feel the cruelty. Simple-seeming farming folk, wrapped in poetry, in telepathy, in complexity.
  

Next I Woolfed down ‘Orlando’. Ah, to live three hundred years, and ah, to stay 36 (though I did not enjoy that age myself very much, much better to be 33) and ah to change sex and to see so damn well, no glasses needed for our Orlando. This book was my first experience of stream of conscious, my first time for seeing an author really breaking the rules, having fun with constructs, expectations. And what a lovely long love letter, Vita obviously had great legs!
 

Banks got his brilliance back with 'Transitions'. He was my hero for many years and then I fell out of love. I picked this up in a charity shop, a fevered purchase prior to a holiday. And what a wonderful read for a holiday. I don’t remember much of where I was, because I was spinning through worlds. Yes, I fell back in love. For me this is plot at its most epic and powerful. Awe-inspiring, what an incredible imagination, what a loss he died so young. 
  

Who’s on the shore? ‘Kafka on the Shore’. Haruki Murakami is another amazing mind. A man that can talk to cats. Johnny Walker and the KFC Colonel wandering around reality. All the descriptions of food in between. The cleanliness of the translation. Magical Realism. I wish my world was more absurd, more Murakami. 
 

It has been indulgent. But it’s been bliss. And there should be more on this list but I’ve run out of summer and I must take what I can from this genius and try not to be intimidated.Now I know I must get back to writing.