Perusing a bookshelf can feel a tad voyeuristic; what's made the cut and how books are arranged can tell you about a person's tastes, values and even their psyche.
What about the bookshelves of great writers? What can they tell us about acclaimed authors and their works?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh — co-hosts of RN's The Bookshelf — are obsessed with knowing what's on the bookshelves of the best novelists.
They've been asking writers about the books that have shaped them since their show began in 2018.
"What we found was the surprise, delight and sheer eclecticism of reading lives," says Evans.
"The crime writer who was shaped by science fiction, the literary author who discovered plot through detective novels, the romantic who thrilled to hardboiled noir.
"Every book is begat by other books; every reader holds a library."
So let's rifle through those bookshelves.
Bernadine Evaristo
English writer Bernadine Evaristo won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other — which is about the lives of 12 characters, mostly Black women, over many generations.
Evaristo says that one inspiration for the multi-narrator novel was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by African American writer Ntozake Shange, which she saw on stage in 1979.
"It was the first time that I'd seen a play, or as she called it 'choreopoetry', just about black women," says Evaristo.
She says one book that's on the bookshelf that made her is The Bone People by novelist, poet and short-story-writer of Maori ancestry Keri Hulme, who in 1985 became the first New Zealander to win the Booker.
"That book was very important to me when I was coming of age as a writer, and trying to find stories and forms that would help me feel that I could be part of the literary world," Evaristo says.
Evaristo says those possibilities were in both subject and form: one of the novel's protagonists is an eccentric Maori woman, and Hulme's book is both fragmentary and poetic.
Melissa Lucashenko
The Bone People is also on the bookshelf of Australian writer Melissa Lucashenko, whose novel Too Much Lip won the 2019 Miles Franklin award.
Lucashenko started reading early, but says that Hulme's novel, which she read in her early 20s, was "the first book that I truly felt connected to in a really deep way".
"It was a groundbreaking book in lots of ways: it centred an Indigenous woman and her experience, it's postmodern in that it flips between voices a lot ... and it is actually the story of a queer family."
Hulme's book also incorporates Maori language, an influence on Lucashenko, who weaved Bundjalung-Yugambeh language into her acclaimed 2013 novel Mullumbimby.
Lucashenko says Bruce Pascoe's 2001 novel Earth was also integral to this element of her writing.
"[He introduces the reader to the Wathaurong language] a little bit in chapter one and then a little bit more in chapter two until by the end of the book, you understand so much ... It's just remarkable," she says.
Lucashenko says that storytelling, particularly stories she heard in Aboriginal communities in Queensland and New South Wales, sits behind her writing as much as books do.
"It's maybe not intentional storytelling, but do you know the concept of the 'found poem'? Well, I wander around and I think I encounter the 'found story'."
Tayari Jones
American novelist Tayari Jones is best known for her fourth novel An American Marriage, which won a 2018 NAACP Image Award and was an Oprah Book Club selection.
Her bookshelf includes literary legend Toni Morrison and her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, which follows an African American man on a journey to explore his family history.
"The thing about Morrison that makes her such a genius is that she can take the lives of ordinary people and raise them all the way up to the level of mythology," Jones says.
Jones says Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's 1958 debut novel Things Fall Apart, which she read while living in Nigeria, was an emotional page-turner that helped her engage with and understand colonialism.
"It changed my understanding of world history and even understanding the soil on which I stood."
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White was the first book that Jones read, and she says even to this day when she's nervous she repeats to herself the words that Charlotte spins in her web to save Wilbur the pig: "Some pig, terrific, radiant, humble."
"As a writer, I think it's important to remember how I learned to love reading in the first place," she says.
Heather Rose
Tasmanian author Heather Rose won the 2016 Stella Prize for The Museum of Modern Love; her latest, critically acclaimed novel is the political satire Bruny.
When Rose was six years old, her father picked out the first book she ever borrowed from the adult section of the library: Ernest Hemingway's short 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea.
"It's the first time a book broke my heart ... and I remember thinking 'Wow, a book doesn't just take you places, it makes you feel things', and I thought at the time, I want to be a writer like that," she says.
Alongside this Hemingway book, Rose says her bookshelf would have to include two Virginia Woolf books that she regularly revisits: To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway.
"I love the way she [Woolf] stretches language in a way that is bold and brave — as if she's considered the literary canon and made it entirely her own."
Rose says she's recently been shaped by the work of Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, but that her bookshelf wouldn't be complete without works by Margaret Atwood.
"What I've loved about Margaret Atwood is that she writes something different every time."
Michael Connelly
Best-selling and award-winning American crime writer Michael Connelly, whose latest novel is The Law of Innocence, is a voracious reader of literary Los Angeles, his home and the setting of many of his books.
"I became a writer largely because of the works of Raymond Chandler," says Connelly.
Every year before he begins writing a book, he rereads chapter 13 of Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister, a self-contained episode where private investigator Philip Marlowe drives around LA.
"It still captures the essence of Los Angeles. So he achieved, to me, a rare level of art ... that still inspires me every time I try to do my own take on Los Angeles."
Connelly says American postmodern novelist and satirist Kurt Vonnegut was a key author on his teenage bookshelf.
"It was just [because of the] unbounded imagination in his books and at the same time, his books had a message."
Connelly's 1996 novel The Poet is filled with allusions to macabre short story writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe.
"I hope I write them [books] where you feel like you've just got to check over your shoulder, just make sure there's no one behind you. And I think that was something that Poe was great at."
Jennifer Egan
American writer Jennifer Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad, and she says the bookshelf that made her would have to include Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel about the lives of African Americans in the 40s, Invisible Man.
"I feel like Ellison took the tools of modernism — which basically was about trying to use language to more accurately map consciousness — and took it a step further and used it to map exclusion."
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a 1905 novel about an impoverished socialite in New York City's high society, is also on Egan's bookshelf.
The historical backdrop of Egan's critically acclaimed 2018 novel Manhattan Beach is the Depression and World War II, and Egan says Don DeLillo's weighty 1997 tome Underworld, about the Cold War and its aftermath, is another of her formative reads.
"Sometimes fiction can tell me more than non-fiction about what it was like to be alive at a certain time ... In reading Underworld, I got a sense of the textures of Cold War life all over America."
Andrew O'Hagan
Don DeLillo also appears on the foundational bookshelf of Booker-nominated Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan.
But O'Hagan — whose latest novel Mayflies' first half is filled with the sounds, sights and politics of 80s UK — was influenced by DeLillo's Libra, a 1998 novelistic telling of the Kennedy assassination.
"It takes the whole culture in ... the musical landscape, television, newsreels, cinema, mystery stories, the whole beat of America at that time, has been worked into that book, and that's a real inspiration for me," says O'Hagan.
Another formative book for the novelist is Norma Jean, a 1959 biography of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles, which he picked up at age 12, by chance, at a hairdresser.
"I was absolutely lost in the story. And it taught me something about writing, which is about ... somehow creating a little piece of model arithmetic on the page, where they [the reader] can put themselves in place of the characters and see their own lives afresh."
What rounds out O'Hagan's bookshelf? He says it has to have Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, as well as the novels of Graham Greene and Truman Capote.
"[Those books] just seemed to show a sense of what was possible as a writer."
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAxLTAxL21pY2hhZWwtY29ubmVsbHktaGVhdGhlci1yb3NlLWJvb2tzLXJlYWRpbmctbGl0ZXJhdHVyZS8xMjk3NTgxMtIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjk3NTgxMg?oc=5
2020-12-31 19:03:00Z
CAIiEMzweh42XNm62FoIvQY0mX8qFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDciw4
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