Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Harry Ricketts – poet, literary scholar and author of memoir First Things and around 30 other books.
The book I wish I’d written
Byron’s comic verse-novel Don Juan. Then I’d be “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. (Or not.)
Everyone should read
Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife will make you laugh, think and be envious of Duffy’s poetic chutzpah.
The book I want to be buried with
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. It’ll be quiet in the grave, and I’ll need plenty to mull over as I decompose.
The first book I remember reading by myself
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten. I was six and, like Tom, wanted to crawl up the chimney and onto the roof. I figured I could easily deal with those rats that wanted to put him in a roly poly pudding.
The book I wish I’d never read
I had to teach D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover for a spell in the 1980s to first-year students. It’s just a sick man’s wish fulfilment fantasy and so badly written.
The book that haunts me
I first read Alfred Andersch’s Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (in German) when I was 15. It describes a series of loosely connected characters, all at risk, who come together in a small North Sea town in the late 1930s. I still recall certain phrases.
The book that made me cry
Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Well, obviously!
The book that made me laugh
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It’s dark laughter, of course,
If I could only read three books for the rest of my life they would be
Jane Austen’s Persuasion because it’s about surviving when all hope is gone. George Eliot’s Middlemarch because it’s the great English novel and brilliantly catches life’s mixture of tragedy and comedy. Wendy Cope’s Collected Poems because her poems are both funny and melancholy, and one would need that with only three books.
The book character I identify with most
Anne Elliot in Persuasion. See above.
Encounter with an author
At the 2014 Writers and Readers week in Wellington, I chaired a session with the feminist literary critic and essayist Terry Castle; she proposed to me on stage.
Greatest New Zealand book
Patricia Grace’s Tu. Show me a greater …
Greatest New Zealand writer
Allen Curnow. He has written the great local poems from a Pākehā perspective. He’s technically unrivalled and understands all about God-lack.
Best thing about reading
Being outside your own head and inside the world of the book.
What are you reading right now
Una Cruickshank’s The Chthonic Cycle. This is a very timely and thought-provoking collection of essays, and I like her prose.
First Things by Harry Ricketts ($35, Te Herenga Waka University Press); and Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes: The Story Of An Ashes Classic by David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts ($50, Bloomsbury) are available for purchase at Unity Books.