One of the key pieces of advice given to aspiring authors is to read– read lots, read widely, read everything! So, when I was asked to write a blog about the books that made me, I knew immediately that it was going to be challenging – I’ll give it a try, but frankly, the books listed below will only be the tip of the iceberg.
In the beginning life was magical there were two main themes that dominated my childhood reading – fairy tales and boarding schools. My dad would drop me off at Oswestry library on Saturday mornings, and I would scan the bookshelves for new renditions of the classic Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimms tales, and any new Mallory Towers I could get my hands on. It’s funny to see my daughter going through an equally passionate boarding school phase – not just the Mallory Towers series by Enid Blyton, but also newer ones such as The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani.
The teenage years were all about discovering, and in the early years, aside from enjoying Judy Blume and Nancy Drew, I confess to finding a copy of Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic tucked inside my aunt’s bedside table during a particularly stifling summer holiday…I literally read anything I could get my hands on even if, in hind sight, I was a little young for the Dollanganger family’s amorous adventures! I loved the Point Horror series and being scared witless by Christopher Pike and RL Stine. I then spent months devouring the Sweet Valley High series, which was put to an end when my English teacher complained that my writing was beginning to sound like the new Francine Pascale. My dad decided to take things into his own hands, buying me a set of Penguin classics, and thus began my years of reading the Victorians – Dickens, Hardy, Gaskill, Eliot and the Brontës. Tess and Great Expectations stand out for me now, though needless to say, I loved all of them, and soon my writing at school began to sound Victorian much to the irritation of my poor English teacher… What I loved about these classics was that being bought up as a British Muslim child in the 80s by very strict Bangladeshi parents, I could sort of relate to that Victorian moral and sexual restraint depicted in those stories. By then, in my late teens I was searching the shelves for more representation and it came in the form of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, a copy of which I found at North Shropshire College while supposedly studying for my History A ‘Level. My mind was blown. I loved it so much that despite it being exam season, I devoured all 1000 plus pages in three days. Surprisingly, I didn’t find characters I related to, but I found everything else – family, romance, intrigue, a country going through major political upheaval, and most importantly, characters and stories I cared about. Thus began my love for panoramic, immersive novels of epic scope and for pre- and post-partition India. That summer became the summer of Indian heritage writers: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Tales from Firozsha Baag and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column are the much-loved books I still have in my bookcase.
Young adulthood was a brief hiatus from serious fiction reading while I studied for my law degree at Warwick. I still managed to get hooked on my young cousin’s Harry Potter books though, and then his trilogy of Pullman’s Dark Materials – the child in me who loved fantasy and horror was still very much alive! Then in 2000, as I began my new life as a young lawyer in London, I finally found a character like me between the pages of a book – Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Her stories about second generation Bengalis living in the West filled me with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and relief. Protagonists like me existed! And they had wonderful stories to tell! Over the coming years, I discovered Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Yaa Gyasi, Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jeffrey Eugenides and so many more writers from whom I learnt how the universal themes in literature (for example, love, courage, freedom, family, faith, justice, coming of age) can be beautifully enriched by the specificities of ethnicity and culture. I no longer needed to read Lahiri’s novels simply to be able to relate to her protagonists because finally, thanks to all of these writers who write about other communities and races, I felt duly represented. I am still a loyal reader of Lahiri’s books but not so much to find myself, rather to enjoy her beautiful, sparse prose that can evoke powerful emotions without resorting to sensationalism or stereotypical tropes.
In short, after this rather long disclaimer about the impossibility of choosing the books that have made me – because in a sense, every book I’ve ever read, has “made” me – I will set out a list of ten specific books that have inspired me as a writer (in no particular order):
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides because I love family stories and this was such a wonderful way to tell one – and because, from the very first sentence, I was completely hooked (it was an amazing first sentence: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974”)
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens because it is a masterpiece worthy of several re-reads but primarily because of its incredibly endearing protagonist, Pip, who was possibly my first proper teenage crush, (aside from Colin Firth emerging out of that pond in that scene in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice).
- On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong because the prose is sublime and the story so incredibly raw and moving.
- In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin because he writes so skilfully about the shock of changes on old ways of life that you want each short story to be stretched into a novel just to be able stay with it longer.
- A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes for the underline-worthy prose and the intricate and nuanced use of language to articulate the subjectivity of memory.
- Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stagner because it is a love-letter to marriage and friendship and because of its unharried pace and beautiful descriptions of landscape and nature.
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout because I am such a fan of Strout’s writing and her ability to paint a meticulous portrait of a community, but also because Olive is such a fascinating, unpredictable protagonist.
- A Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro because of its mediations on memory and because I found the ending so achingly, heart-wrenchingly sad.
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke because she is such an incredible writer who conjured up The House – a world I couldn’t extricate myself from for weeks after finishing this book.
- Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri – because it captures the challenges facing the Bengali diaspora in such a precise and measured way, and because the elegance of her prose is unparalleled.