Colin Thubron: ‘Simone de Beauvoir altered my ideas about women’
My earliest reading memory
I was seven years old and already drawn to distant countries when I read The Children’s Tales from Other Lands, retold by FH Lee. These were simple fables from countries that filled me with wonder: Arabia, China, Egypt, Russia. I still have my disintegrated copy of the book, scrawled with my child’s crayons.
My favourite book growing up
In my prep school library The Log of the Ark by Kenneth Walker was the one I loved, fascinated by its tale of Noah’s gathering the animals. Some of these were imagined creatures, such as the psychotically shy “Seventy-sevenses” (named after their cabin number), and a subversive creature named the Scub. Years later I realised the book was an analogy of the Fall. The animals embark in peace, but the Scub corrupts their minds, and after landfall they hunt down or flee one another.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir altered my 18-year-old ideas (such as they were) about women. An early and profoundly influential work of feminism, it portrayed women’s cultural constriction through the ages. But to my yearning teenage self it seemed to reveal a rich interior female world, and rendered women more opaque still.
It was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, given to me by my mother when I was 12, that confirmed my love of lyrical language
The writer who changed my mind
A brilliant and upsetting work, Consciousness Explained, by the American cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. To anyone like me, who routinely assumed there was some kind of unified consciousness (or even soul), this was revelatory. Dennett describes instead a human brain composed of countless homunculi (his own metaphor), each one responding separately but shaping the illusion of a unified mind.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I had wanted to be a writer since early childhood, and imagined becoming a poet. It was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, given to me by my mother when I was 12, that confirmed my love of lyrical language. Yet my early fascination was not with the book’s more sophisticated excerpts. I devoured the epics of Alfred Tennyson and WE Aytoun rather than the poems of John Donne.
The book I came back to
When I was young I was daunted by the density of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and soon abandoned it. But in middle age its psychological intensity fascinated me, and the terrible questions of its atheist brother Ivan remain unanswerable.
The book I reread
I rarely reread, but The Road to Oxiana, that great travel book by Robert Byron, is a tonic to anyone exhausted by the genre. Its apparently episodic form – a carefully organised sequence of vivid description, erudite essay, farcical vignettes, even news clippings – is ideal for dipping in and out, and it contains some of the most beautiful architectural descriptions.
The book I could never read again
John Braine’s Room at the Top was all the rage in the late 1950s, when I became (temporarily) a publisher. But the book seems quite banal now. Perhaps the newly exciting “working-class novel” too swiftly burgeoned and diversified.
The book I discovered later in life
I don’t know why I delayed reading Proust until I was 50. In Search of Lost Time contains the most delicate, insightful and subtle explorations of love, memory and obsession that I’ve ever read.
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The book I am currently reading
Monty Lyman’s The Painful Truth explains how the brain may control and monitor pain. I am barely halfway through, but it’s a riveting exploration written at the cutting-edge of a fast-evolving science.
My comfort read
I wish I had such a thing. But I seem to read for new understanding, and it’s rarely comforting.
The Amur River: Between Russia and China by Colin Thubron is published in paperback by Vintage.