{"id":820690,"date":"2026-07-24T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/820690\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T11:00:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:00:12","slug":"lucy-caldwell-even-your-text-messages-fizz-after-reading-james-joyce-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/820690\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucy Caldwell: \u2018Even your text messages fizz after reading James Joyce\u2019 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

My earliest reading\u00a0memory
The summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk\u00a0to the shops at\u00a0Cherryvalley, in east\u00a0Belfast, to do her messages, and she\u2019d buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, illustrated tales from around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading the stories, a ding to tell you when to\u00a0turn the page. My favourite was a Japanese folktale called The Goblin Rat. I was only just two, but I listened to\u00a0it, entranced and terrified, until I could recite it by heart.<\/p>\n

My favourite book\u00a0growing up
Susan Cooper\u2019s The Dark Is Rising series. I first read them aged 10 \u2013 I\u2019ve read the title book every midwinter since, and read them last year with my own then-10-year-old son. They tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now\u00a0as then.<\/p>\n

The book that made me\u00a0want to be a writer
Jennifer Johnston\u2019s How Many Miles to Babylon? We read it in English when I was 13 and our homework was to write an extra chapter. I spent every spare minute that week writing mine \u2013 the intoxicating feeling of tuning in to another world, until that world becomes more real than your own.<\/p>\n

The book I\u00a0came back to
I\u2019ve always loved Dubliners by James Joyce, but first read Ulysses in\u00a0paroxysms of\u00a0undergraduate anxiety about not \u201cgetting\u201d the references. Years later, I bought an\u00a0edition with no footnotes, no endnotes, just the novel itself \u2013 it was, and continues to be, one of the most glorious reading experiences of my life. Even your text messages fizz after you\u2019ve been reading Joyce.<\/p>\n

The book I reread
Clarissa Pinkola Est\u00e9s, Women Who Run With the Wolves. She\u2019s a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora, a keeper of the old tales, and this book is about the secret gifts and power of mythology, the\u00a0paths to your inner psyche, reclaiming your wildness. I\u2019ve read it in my 20s, 30s and 40s, and different stories have sung out to me each time. Every woman should read this book.<\/p>\n

The book I could never\u00a0read again
I love Rosamond Lehmann but I\u2019ve never been able to get past the part in The Echoing Grove where two sisters try, ineptly and at agonising length, to bludgeon a rat to death.<\/p>\n

The book I discovered\u00a0later in life
As teenagers, we\u2019d dare each other to leave the school library copy of Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover open on the \u201cdirty bits\u201d \u2013 where the spine was broken. But I didn\u2019t actually read any DH Lawrence until I was in my 40s, and I\u2019m so glad I came to that book later in life, as a wife, as a mother. It\u2019s not the explicitness of the sex that\u2019s shocking \u2013 it\u2019s\u00a0the ardency of the longing, the abandon of his rhythms. That would have been wasted on me before.<\/p>\n

The book I am currently\u00a0reading
I\u2019ve just finished Helen\u00a0Bain\u2019s debut, The Daffodil Days, which I loved \u2013 an account of Sylvia Plath\u2019s last year, told backwards, in an intricate series of stories by people momentarily close to her. It\u2019s hard to know what to follow it up with, but I have high hopes for Courttia Newland\u2019s The Art of Opposition, a book of essays \u201con hope, resilience and creative expression beyond the mainstream\u201d, by a writer I know to be a formidably sharp and compassionate thinker.<\/p>\n

My comfort read
It\u2019s not that the stories themselves are comforting \u2013 far from it \u2013 but I reread Lorrie Moore\u2019s Self-Help. There\u2019s such pleasure in knowing that each story, like Philip Larkin\u2019s definition of poetry, is a perfect verbal device to take you through its experience.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Bookmarks<\/p>\n

Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Devotions <\/a>by Lucy Caldwell is published by\u00a0Faber. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My earliest reading\u00a0memoryThe summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk\u00a0to the shops at\u00a0Cherryvalley,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-820690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}