Tonight:
4°c
Sophie Dahl has revealed the 10 books that shaped her life and inspired her to take up writing. Her choices range from Zadie Smith's White Teeth (which eased her homesickness in New York) to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (she aspired "to be half as good as Alan Hollinghurst"). The books that shaped my life were by no means the most consoling, or the best books I have ever read, but they certainly coloured my tastes and outlook.
When I was accompanying my mother to South America on a cargo ship aged seven, I decided there was more to life than staring at the sea day after day. So I picked up my first novel, Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene. Henry and his aunt gallivant around the world encountering a series of memorable characters. As Henry became addicted to his new life of adventure, so I became addicted to literature.
Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals transported me to another world - Corfu - and his portrayal of scorpions, toads, ladybirds and glow-worms was far superior to any Disney production. It was only after reading Tarka the Otter, by Henry Williamson, that I realised literature could move you to tears. Much later I discovered it could also instil a sense of foreboding. George Orwell's novel 1984 shaped my fear of the future when I was a teenager. His vision of a totalitarian state resembled rather too closely my own school and stirred me to revolt against authority.
Borges's Labyrinths proved that fact could be combined with fiction to spell-binding effect: his stories about time, illusion and infinity were more magical than any mood-enhancing narcotic in my teens. The seduction scene in The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth opened my innocent eyes to the charms of the French language - "Viens, primitif" were the two sexiest words I would hear in any tongue for years to come. Thank you, Freddie. Unlike my school contemporaries I enjoyed Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and shivered in Magwitch's shadow.
Karel Capek's Letters from England made me see England with fresh eyes, as a foreigner. He observes that in England streets are not where anything happens but they are just used to rush home. I naively used to think magical realism was the preserve of the Latin Americans but then I read Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England and realised the baroque imagination had its origins in Europe.
And all fiction flows from that most baroque of creations Don Quixote, about a man who reads too many books and loses his sanity, imagining he is a knight errant. As Emerson said, there is creative reading as well as creative writing. Books shape us all, whether you are a reader, or a writer, or both.
