Here’s a meme so you can find out about how my reading influences my writing!
1. The last book I read was…
Heaven Can Wait by Cally Taylor. Brilliant read.
2. The book I’m currently reading…
The Charming Man by Marian Keyes.
3. The last bestseller I’ve read is…
The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
4. The last book I’ve bought/received is…
NLP Workbook!
5. The books I’ll be buying soon is/are…
Luxury by Jess Ruston (apparently it has a lot of sex in it!)
6. My favourite children’s book is…
The Wierdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. Even now, when at Alderly Edge, I am transported back to this book
7. My favourite Shakespear Play is:
Julius Ceasar – I like politics! Also this play introduced me to the word ‘soothsayer’!
8. Best period of literature?
Now – it’s so exciting
9. Emily Brönte or Jane Austen?
Emily Bronte. Purely because of the brooding darkness and my preoccupation with moors.
10. My favourite poet/s is/are…
I love Louis McNeice and ‘Entirely’ is my favourite poem. I also like Patience Strong, mainly because hers was the first poetry anthology I owned.
11. My favourite literary character is…
Rebecca. I love that a character can be central even though they are absent. Also Galadriel. She is powerful yet knows her own vulnerability.
12. A book I could reread a thousand times is…
Lord of the Rings. I. Just. Love. It. I adore the whole concept of it from the maps to the language to the way it was written during a war and how that maps onto it. Tolkien’s imaginative world is the kind of psychological occupation I could easily lose myself in creatively if I had the opportunity in terms of time and finance. I have experienced this kind of ‘flow’ whilst writing and it is enticing to me.
13. A book I hated is…
A Mills and Boon book that I found in a hospital waiting room when I was awaiting treatment for a fractured vertebrae – I was hungry for words but emotionally and physically poverty stricken and it didn’t help me at all
14. If my life were a book, it would be…
Acquaintances would say Bridget Jones’ Diary, friends would say White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I would say Lord of the Rings because almost every day of my life I have to climb the mountain and throw the ring into the fire before the eye of Mordor turns on me 🙂
15. My ritual when reading a book is…
I read in hotel rooms when I’m travelling with my job and in bed before I go to sleep. On the bus between home and work and on the train between London and Manchester.
16. Best places to buy books…
Usually Waterstones but also a little bookshop in Upton-on-Severn when I’m on holiday in the Cotswolds.
17. The language(s) I read most of my books in is…
English.
18. Do you write? If so, what?
I write both fiction and non-fiction. My non-fiction is about identity construction and my book ‘Identity, Health and Women’ will be published next year by Pallgrave MacMillan. My fiction writing is emergent from my PhD study, again around identity constructions, but this time through storytelling and characterisations. On feeds the other.
19. Recommend a book…
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
For creative people: The Writer’s Way by Julia Cameron