Alan Taylor on being inspired by Muriel Spark, the novel he most recommends and knowing if he’ll stick to a book after the first page.
The first book I remember reading:
I learned to read with a series of books in which the two main characters were called Janet and John. These just happened to be the same names as my parents, so I was naturally intrigued. I can’t remember a thing about them now. After that I got hooked on the Jennings stories by Anthony Buckeridge set in an English boarding school. The thought of a tuck shop seemed very appealing.
A book I recommend to everyone:
I’m always recommending books to other people – it’s a legacy of my former life as a librarian. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is for me the perfect novel, not only because its eponymous ‘heroine’ is such a fascinating character but because of its portrayal of Edinburgh in the late 1920s where it was such a dour, gray, introverted town. It’s such a witty, clever, dark book, and beautifully and sparingly and musically written.
The best book I have read in this year:
HHhH by Laurent Binet. It’s a lightly fictionalised account of the attempt in 1942 by two Czech parachutists to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, aka “the hangman of Prague”, who was one of the architects of the Final Solution. Published originally in French in 2009, it appeared in English three years later. Why it took me so long to get round to heaven only knows.
The book I am most looking forward to:
Boris Johnson’s Unleashed – if only for the fun I’ll have throwing it with force against a brick wall.
A book I didn’t finish:
I try not to read books I don’t think I’ll like. You can find most of them on the bestseller list. Usually I can tell from the first sentence or, at a push, the first page, whether I will stick with something or not. Countless contemporary novels seek immediately to shock or startle. Too many crime novels fall into this category.
An author that has inspired me:
As a journalist, I spent many happy years meeting and interviewing authors, from the great and the good to the not so great and the irredeemably bad. I took inspiration from many of the former but the one to whom I related the most was Muriel Spark. For me, she epitomised what a writer should and can be if you stick to your principles and are not influenced by outside factors and fashions. How her surname suited her.
The book I am reading now:
Life is too short to read the literary equivalent of junk food. Long term, I’m sustained by Robert Caro’s magnificent, multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction but I’m very much enjoying Andrew O’Hagan’s ambitious Caledonian Road and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, in which the hero is a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome. I think that may be a first.
Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over 30 years. He was deputy editor and managing editor of The Scotsman, and for 15 years was Writer-at-Large for the Sunday Herald. Edinburgh: The Autobiography is out now, published by Birlinn. You can order your copy here.
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