Emma Donoghue's Bookshelf
Emma Donoghue's latest novel Room has been popping up on prestigious literary prize shortlists all around the world, like, oh, you know, the Man Booker Prize. So she's officially a Very Impressive Individual, but she was also kind enough to share with us the deep dark secrets of her reading habits. Like her fascination with the current Leader of the Free World, and how threat of hemorrhoids keeps her bathroom book-free.
The books on my shelf that have the most sentimental value are…none, actually; I wouldn't rush to save any of them in a fire. That's because the body of a book, to me, is important only in that it attracts a reader to read it; the book itself really exists in that space between a text and the reader's mind.
The bookshelf I’d most like a peek at is Barack Obama's.
The one book about China to read? I had the privilege of interviewing Jung Chang when she published her memoir, called Wild Swans in English, and that one really lingers in my mind.
I don't deliberately pretend to have read any books... but I used to tell people what I believed to be the case, that I read Tolstoy's War and Peace in my teens, and recently I tried reading it 'again' and discovered that I had never got more than a hundred pages into it, and I still couldn't this time!
Books I hid before we came around? None. Everything I read is grist to my mill!
Our bathroom is the one room with no books in it. It's not a healthy habit to settle in for a long time on the toilet, and I don't get to have leisurely baths on my own since the kids came along...
Top 3 books ever? Oh dear, I hate having to make these choices... let's say Shakespeare's Complete, Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
Favorite books from childhood are The Narnia cycle by C. S. Lewis.
The book that changed my life was Jeannette Winterson's The Passion. It made me realize that you could write a lesbian story that was great literature as well.
Character in a book I’d like to be? I strongly identify with the one I was named for, the heroine in Jane Austen's Emma.
The last book I bought was Captain Underpants, for my seven-year-old son.
The last book I read was Carol Cassella's Oxygen, a medical-malpractice thriller.
Have I ever judged a book by its cover? Oh, I do every time I'm standing in a bookshop and turn away from an image that doesn't appeal to me... That's why I read reviews and keep a list of books I'd like to try out, because I don't want the cover to be the determining factor.
Book I wish I had written? Many! Let's say Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.
The book I’d like to see adapted as a film is, right now, my own Room; I've written a screenplay and would like nothing better than to be involved in a good film version.
Fiction or non-fiction? Non-fiction is necessary but fiction is magical.
The book I brought on the plane to read is Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, as my next novel is about an unsolved nineteenth-century murder and I want to remind myself how she tackled the one in her novel.
The fictional worlds I’d most like to be part of are the parallel worlds in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
Hardcover, paperback, or e-book? I mostly read paperbacks; they're light and cheap and easy.
My favorite line from a book is from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983): 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'
Emma Donoghue treated the audience to a sold-out reading of Room at the Bookworm International Literary Festival last night (Mar 7), and has a joint event with Christos Tsiolkas this afternoon (Mar 8) at 1pm, both courtesy of the Ireland Literary Exchange. For details, visit www.bookwormfestival.com.
