The Child That Books Built

[On his teenage reading of literary desire]
Women inspired desire by being the objects, of all the objects in the world, in which the Keatsian delights of texture and color and scent were most concentrated; the warm and bountiful surfaces against which you most wanted to press and huddle. More than that: they broadcast desire, they did desire to men, and so to you, the male reader, when they were evoked on the page. But at the same time, they thwarted desire, by not quite being objects at all, by not being as open to possession as all the other objects that they exceeded in desirability. It was as if women were playing an unfair trick, and they did it, this invidious, provocative withholding of themselves, merely by being people.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

[Spufford explains exactly how I feel about scifi:] Some it was frankly bad. Some of it was good on one point only - one idea, one invention and the whole of the rest of the novel existed only as a scaffolding to hold that one good thing in place.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

To reformulate reading at thirteen, you jump to adult books. One entry point is via the classics. Amid the baffling profusion of grown-up possibilities, a reassuring sense of order adheres to the novels from the past that have already been sifted through and declared good, and conveniently assembled together, as a row of orange Penguins in a bookshop, or a dump of old Everymans discovered in a cardboard box. The country is dotted with dormant shelves-full of standard editions, put together by a previous generation, and waiting for a bored thirteen-year-old to blow the dust off. Go this way, and your next move when Narnia ceases to satisfy is to Jane Eyre. Fiction recomplicates itself for you: you step up a whole level of complexity. Suddenly you are surrounded anew by difficulties and riches commensurate with your state of mind. From an exhausted territory, you have come to an unexplored one, where manners and intentions are all to find, just like the rules of your own new existence in your own new lurch-prone adolescent body; and here the emotions are urgent again, because the great canonical novels of courtship – Jane Austen is next – all deal with people circling warily, interestedly, as they try to figure each other out, and decide from cues of behaviour like the ones real other people present to you yourself, whether this person or that is the one with whom desire and affection and trust can come together.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

I should have been terrified, with two of the three people I loved most going under the knife at once, but I had cultivated blind faith in doctors as an essential fear-limiting tool.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

School stories explore what are essentially autonomous towns of children. As a perceptive critic of Harry Potter pointed out, what makes the school setting liberating is that the school rules are always arbitrary rules, externally imposed. You can break them, when you get into scrapes, without feeling any guilt, or without affecting the loyalty to the institution that even unruly characters feel, right down from Angel Brazil to Joanne Rowling. Harry loves Hogwarts. The rules of conduct that really count are worked out by the children themselves, and exist inside the school rules like a live body inside a suit of armor. School stories are about children judging each other. The adults whose decisions would be emotionally decisive -- parents -- are deliberately absent.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

While in Narnia good and evil were distinct, as distinct as a lion is from a witch, in town [Spufford's category of 'town books'] they had to be worked out, in the actions of people who had to live tomorrow with what they and everybody else did today.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

A deeply carnal individual, Lewis always imagined heaven in carnal, you might say hypercarnal, terms. It was not just the place where we will encounter immortal love ... it was also the home of the immortal sausage, more brown, more popping, more savory in its skin than the shadow sausages we know now; of immortal beer, and immortal tobacco, and all the other things Lewis enjoyed.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

For four or five years, I essentially read other books because I could not always be rereading the Narnia books. I had a book-a-day habit to support, and there were only seven of them after all. But in other books, I was always seeking for partial or diluted reminders of Narnia, always hoping for a gleam of the sensation of Narnia. Once felt, never forgotten.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

This book [a baby's picture book that has complimentary pictures of mommies and daddies] is already giving the adult intermediary who offers it to a child a little something for him- or herself, as the best picture books do, pleasing the social intelligence of adults on the quiet.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

I would have taken away what afflicted her if I could, but since I couldn't I hated her for what she made me feel, and I wished she was dead, or at any rate safely segregated somewhere where the sight of her didn't burrow at the long-buried roots in me of an intolerable pity: a pity I can't live up to, and can't bear to be reminded of.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

It made a kind of intangible shoplifting possible, I realized. If your memory was OK you could descend on a bookshop - a big enough one so that the staff wouldn't hassle a browser - and steal the contents of a book by reading them.

Quoted on February 20, 2012

And I had a cultural sanction for my addiction. Books get cited over and over as the virtuous term of a contrast whose wicked other half is Nintendo, or MTV, or the Web.

Quoted on February 20, 2012