Hilary Mantel, author of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” told the New York Times that she prefers “books with action.. I don’t like over-refinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities.”
Much like our Reading Addicts, Hilary finds it difficult to pin her ‘favourite’ read down to one genre, let alone one book. She has a favourite type of book for personal enrichment, a favourite to re-read, a favourite to simply enjoy…
Hilary Mantel’s favourite place to read is while relaxing at home in Devon, with the sea as her background soundtrack. Speaking to the NYT in 2013, she says:
“In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration.”
According to Mantel’s interview with the New York Times she has a varied pile of favourite books she dips into when she can. Have a look at the list we have collated here, you may be surprised at the eclectic mix Hilary Mantel reads!
“There’s reading that’s important to me, in a personal way: I’ve been working my way through the books of the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of thinking over the content.”
““Best” as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson’s novel, “Life After Life,” ingenious and furiously energetic: it’s exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game.”
“Rereading (is) very important to me now. Last year I was commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas’s “Religion and the Decline of Magic,” and it gave me a reason to sit down with it again. It’s a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I’ve pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)”
“I’d like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters’s “Fingersmith”: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it.”
“It’s not recent, but I would recommend “Bad Blood,” by Lorna Sage. It’s a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir’s not an easy form… Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.”
“I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don’t like over-refinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she’s so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.)”
“Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It’s a story told in match statistics, but it’s also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.”
“When I was 9, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was 10. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That’s just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That’s when I became enthralled by R. L. Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens.”
“No book has mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare I laid my hands on when I was 10. Previously I’d only read one scene from “Julius Caesar” that I found in an ancient schoolbook. It definitely qualified as the best thing I’d ever read, and I almost exploded with joy when I found there was a whole fat book of plays. I was a strange child.”
“I was lucky enough to be the only child in a three-generation household… So lots of people were willing to read to me. I had the capacity to remember by heart what I heard and I could say the passages over when I pleased. They had to read me tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I didn’t really like anything else. It meant that by the time I went to school I had a bizarre vocabulary and a limited but martial outlook.”
“Once I’d banished King Arthur, and I was 9 or 10, the characters I lived through were the two leading men in “Kidnapped,” the strait-laced young David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck. The lessons I learned through David were that you had to leave home, go out into the world, and become your own man; and you must not despise any unlikely role models you might meet. I didn’t find any similar story to teach me about being a woman.”
“As I have reached the stage in life where I assume the role of parent to my aged parent, I’ve been thinking a lot about families and have just started reading Andrew Solomon’s “Far From the Tree.” Next I’m going to read Francis Spufford’s “Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.””
I think you will agree that that is a wonderful set of recommendations.
Let us know if you have added to your ‘to be read’ pile!
Happy reading!
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