{"id":31364,"date":"2025-09-19T11:11:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T11:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/31364\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T11:11:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T11:11:05","slug":"nick-harkaway-i-loathed-charles-dickens-it-nearly-turned-me-off-reading-for-ever-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/31364\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Harkaway: \u2018I loathed Charles Dickens \u2013 it nearly turned me off reading for ever\u2019 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

My earliest reading\u00a0memory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien<\/a> at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

My favourite book\u00a0growing up
Impossible. I\u2019m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let\u2019s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfect\u00a0of Tove Jansson\u2019s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.<\/p>\n

The book that changed me as a teenager
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens<\/a>, at 14. I\u00a0loathed it. It nearly turned me off reading for ever. Everyone kept telling me it was a masterpiece and I just couldn\u2019t understand why [school would] set a\u00a0book about being an alienated child for a bunch of teenagers. \u201cYes, I know adults are incomprehensible and other people make no sense and loneliness is awful. Why do I need to read about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer who changed\u00a0my mind
Tan Twan Eng<\/a>. The Garden of Evening Mists is a stunning novel \u2013 jaw-dropping, beautiful, intricate, elegant, powerful, touching \u2013 and made me see how books about terrible things can be uplifting to the point of\u00a0transcendent. As I type that it seems obvious, but it wasn\u2019t obvious to me then.<\/p>\n

The book that made me\u00a0want to be a writer
Ah. That one\u2019s a little bit tricky, because I\u2019ve always been immersed in writing. I can tell you that Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell<\/a> is so good that it infuriated me into starting a new novel, and that everything I\u2019ve read by Michael Chabon has filled me with a furious creative envy that makes me work harder. Jeanette Winterson is some kind of perfect dreamer; Anne Carson and Colson Whitehead always make me feel like I should be wilder, wiser and better. But perhaps the honour has to go to A\u00a0Murder of Quality by John le Carr\u00e9. My father gave me a leather-bound copy when I was very young, and the smell of the pages and the beauty of the object itself made me believe in\u00a0the magic of words.<\/p>\n

The book I\u00a0came back to
We\u2019re back with Great\u00a0Expectations. It\u00a0really is a brilliant book, but we shouldn\u2019t force it on teenagers. That\u2019s not to say they shouldn\u2019t read it if they want to. But just because it\u2019s about young people doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s written for them; it\u2019s\u00a0written for the rest of\u00a0us remembering who\u00a0we were.<\/p>\n

The book I reread
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle<\/a>. I read it as\u00a0a child and scared myself sleepless, then at university and chuckled at my tween fear, and again more recently, conscious at last not of the monstrosity of the hound, but the astounding cruelty of\u00a0its master.<\/p>\n

The book I could never\u00a0read again
Almost every book I read for fun between seven and 17. I actually don\u2019t remember what they were, so I can\u2019t name and shame, but that is some kind of judgment in itself. To highlight instead some of the notable exceptions: Susan Cooper\u2019s Dark Is\u00a0Rising sequence, Patricia McKillip\u2019s harpist trilogy, and all things William Gibson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The book I discovered later in life
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.<\/p>\n

The book I am currently\u00a0reading
Matt Wixey\u2019s Basilisk. And, with my kids, I\u2019m\u00a0reading the latest\u00a0Amari Peters book, Amari and the Despicable Wonders by\u00a0BB Alston. It\u2019s very tense and I don\u2019t know how she can possibly win\u00a0through!<\/p>\n

My comfort read
Spook Country by William Gibson, who I mentioned earlier, of course, but this is one of his later books and for me it\u2019s\u00a0just superb. The\u00a0audiobook, read by Robertson Dean, is also a\u00a0gem. The texture of the prose, the encounter between mundane and strange, the magic of story \u2026 it\u2019s a good place to spend an evening.<\/p>\n

Karla\u2019s Choice by Nick\u00a0Harkaway is published by Penguin. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My earliest reading\u00a0memoryI read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-31364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}