My Life in Books – Mrs Moses
My favourite book as a child was...really honestly, and truthfully (and in the full knowledge that I
sound like a great sap, if I'm truthfully honest) my Children's Bible in Colour. It is a massive tome
which used to cut off the circulation to my legs when I sat with it in bed. It has illuminated first
letters at the beginning of stories and huge double page spreads with pictures of important scenes.
The stories were told in extracts from the King James Bible which is so poetic, like filigree gold off the
tongue. Magical. And if you get hold of my copy it will naturally fall open at the blue, blue starry sky
of the Nativity.
I also loved A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. I resented going to bed in
Summer, enjoyed sailing in my Mum's washing basket and on the stairs, until my brother hurt his
knee, and loved being on a swing. As Stevenson says, 'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm
sure we should all be as happy as kings'. ('Happy Thought' from A Child's Garden of Verses)
The book that influenced me most as a teenager was The Blood of Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison. A
story of the early Christian Church told from the perspective of a young Roman slave convert.
Mitchison is a modern Scottish writer whose writing is often involved in describing emerging faith in
young people and concerns itself in how belief takes hold even against violent opposition. I was
inspired and loved her natural, unstuffy style when discussing such deep matters. I also fed my
scandalised feminist side with The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
It's worth re-reading anything by Dickens. Amazing characters and sentence structures so
convoluted, so winding in their construction and taking the reader so far from the main clause on
journeys of fancy that, when they return, dusty and exhausted from their lexical travails, they have
only the barest idea of where they first embarked, often having to begin reading the sentence again,
better prepared, perhaps, for the oubliettes contained therein on the second or third perusal. Phew.
And it is Law in the Moses house that we must read A Christmas Carol aloud around a fire together
during the Christmas holidays. Or we are not allowed Christmas at all.
It's not fashionable but I love a good evening in with the Penguin Anthology of Modern Scottish
Verse. Robert Burns, the border ballads, Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Norman
McCaig, Carol-Anne Duffy, Liz Lochead - a delicious smorgasbord of porridge, whinberries, salt
herring, sparkling fresh spring water and sweet heather honey, oh, and a glug of a peaty, smokey
Islay Single Malt for the brain.
My comfort reading is anything with vampires in it. Dracula, Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood
Series - anything. I once read a book called, Pride and Prejudice and Vampires it was exactly as bad as
you are expecting it would be, maybe worse. The poorer the writing and the deeper the romantic
jeopardy the more firmly I am hooked. I have struggled against this but, I admit, not with a great
fervour.
Frankly, it's over-rated...anything with vampires in.
I've bought it, but never actually finished The Island of The Day Before by Umberto Eco. I keep
hoping that I'll be in an erudite and receptive mood long enough to get into it but I always seem to
fall asleep before this happens. Ho hum.
The best book I've read in the last six months is Unruly Times by A.S. Byatt - really good biography of
the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. It leapt off the page! I've loved most of A.S.
Byatt's books -she wears her learning very lightly and you realise you've learned lots while being
utterly engrossed in a really good story.
On my bedside table at the moment is Norwegian Wood by Murakami. I'm a bit worried I'll give
myself nightmares but the language is both delicately and brutally piquant and the imagery is
spectacular.
My all-time favourite is The Silmarillion by J.R.R.Tolkien. Poetry, mythology, romance, Catholicism,
and mysticism all conveyed in the most stately elegance. Words to conjure with and images to relish.
If you ask me the same questions tomorrow, you would probably get an entirely different list.
There is a question missing... the book that has made me laugh the most has been A Walk in the
Woods by Bill Bryson and the book that made me cry the most was Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.