Pinched from Mon at Holistic Mama.

What author do you own the most books by?
It’s a tie between Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, the former because I love love love him, and the latter because I wrote a chapter of my PhD thesis on him.

What book do you own the most copies of?
Until recently, I had five copies of Gawain and the Green Knight. Wait – don’t judge me yet: I have reasons! I bought my first copy when I was nineteen and a first-year undergrad. Then I took a further Middle English module in second year, and of course, the reading list included a different edition. Was it in the library? Was it fuck. Then I taught a course when I was working as a seminar tutor during my PhD – yes – you’ve got it – two more editions courtesy of two different module conveners. And then I bought one more, because it was edited by my personal tutor, a lovely man who interviewed me for my place at university and said ‘I’m supposed to ask you about this bloody poem, but frankly I’ve spent all day talking about it, and I’m fed up to the back teeth with it. So, what shall we talk about?’

Did it bother you that those questions ended with prepositions?
Yes. I really hate slack English. Unless it’s of my own divising, that is. But seriously – the semi-colon. So very underrated. And why not write in a style which conveys meaning in the most elegant fashion possible? i.e. ‘Of which book do you own the most copies?’ I’m not saying that my writing is elegant – nope, more ‘c’est infernal, mais ça marche’ (which is apparently a contemporary description of the vehicular clutch). But anyway. You get the idea. I will try (very hard) to take my head out of my own arse now. In light of all that, I present the following rephrased question:

With which fictional character are you secretly in love?
Well, I have been quite keen on Kingsley Amis’s Patrick Standish (Take a Girl Like You and Difficulties with Girls) for years; I am also rather fond of Jonathan Strange (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), and of Robert Copplestone (Part of the Furniture, Mary Wesley). Oh, and George from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Profligate, moi?

Which books have you read the most frequently?
I’ve read The Lord of the Rings several times, and E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series. Also Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love, pretty much the entire H. Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle repertoire, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale.

What was your favourite book when you were ten?
I can’t honestly remember; I think I read the Moomins quite a bit around then, though. (Oooh – get me, with my split infinitives. See? I can be out there, me. Living on the edge, with my slack grammar and my open hostility towards the transgressions of others. Oh, and my hypocrisy. That too.)

What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie, courtesy of the Oxfam shop in Teignmouth. It was drivel.

What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
I really enjoyed Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle. It took me a while to get into, but once I had, I was hooked until the very (bitter) end.

Which book would you most like to see made into a film?
That’s a tricky one, but, generally, I find that once something’s made into a film, it skews my vision of it. I saw the film of Twilight a few weeks back – it was rubbish, to be honest, and I’d really enjoyed the books. I like the Harry Potter films, but Daniel Radcliffe is now Harry Potter to me, and before I saw the first one, he didn’t look much like that. (Is now the time to admit, slightly worryingly, that I quite fancy Daniel Radcliffe? I add, in my defence, that he looks very much like Quercus did at that age, so much so that several people have teased him about it in the years since the films came out.)

Which book would you least like to see made into a film?
See above, really.

What is the most low-brow book you’ve read as an adult?
Well, I read a lot of trash. And I mean A LOT. There is just nothing like the raw, adrenalin-filled rubbish that people aim at the ‘young adult’ market. Thanks to that demographic, I have particularly enjoyed the delights of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy, and of Trudi Canavan’s Dark Magician stuff. Oh, and of course, the Twilight quartet.

However, I’ve also read some pretty low-brow stuff as part of my research. You have not read rubbish until you have slogged through Marie Corelli’s Ardath. It is a bewildering work. It includes such lowlights as personal vendettas against critics, protagonists who are clearly idealised versions of Corelli, and, for good measure, a bloody good slug of utter bilge.

What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Well, first define ‘difficult’. If by that you mean ‘you must get through this, come what may, and come out the other side able to answer questions on it in a vaguely coherent manner’, see any of the standard literary criticism on an English lit. degree. So, anything by Foucault, Saussure, Barthes or Walter Benjamin, perhaps. If, on the other hand, you mean ‘challenging because of the emotional response it provokes in you’, I found The Time-Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffeneger) very affecting, along with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. If still another interpretation is meant, however, it took me six months and five attempts to crack Dickens’s Bleak House when I tried it first, at the age of seventeen (I was working in Lincoln’s Inn at the time; it seemed apt).

What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you have seen?
I haven’t seen many, actually; I’ve read nearly all of them, though. Does that count? I suppose the one about which I knew the least when I began it was probably Henry IV.

Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I think probably the Russians.

Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
With a first degree which includes Medieval Studies in its title, the answer should really be Chaucer, I suppose. However, it’s probably Shakespeare, although Milton has a peculiar place in my heart courtesy of a 15,000-word dissertation on the role of kingship in Paradise Lost, and I took a module about Milton as an undergrad partly because the convener, a lifelong Milton obsessive, had become a good friend, and I wanted to see what I was missing. Also, I got my first first (ho) for a Milton essay; I can still see it now: ‘Would you mind if I kept a copy for future generations of my Milton students to look at?’ THERE ARE NO WORDS TO CONVEY THAT LEVEL OF SMUGNESS.

What is the biggest gap in your reading?
Hmm. I dunno, to be honest. Possibly poetry, I think; I am not by nature a poetry fan, with a few notable exceptions. (See below.)

Favourite novel?
Just one? Really? OK. Um. Well. Probably something Wilkie Collins. Yes. I’ll say Armadale.

Poet?
‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, W. B. Yeats. (Those exceptions include Yeats, Donne, Marvell and the Earl of Rochester.)

Work of non-fiction?
At the moment, probably What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen. Longer-term, I have various cookbooks that I love – including various Cranks ones, and a couple of the Moosewood tribe – and some of the academic books I’ve collected are also favourites. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon would be one of them, as would Karen Edwards’s Milton and the Natural World.

Most influential novel you’ve read?
E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, for its ‘Only Connect’ opener. Also, A Room with a View.

Most overrated author?
J. K. Rowling. Yes, they’re good. Yes, they’re entertaining. But beyond that? Ephemera, and largely Tolkein-derived.

Which less widely-read novel would you recommend?
Disraeli’s Du Maurier’s Trilby. For some reason, my brain was confusing Disraeli’s Sybil with this one – no proper reason, of course, unless you count being knackered.

What are you reading right now?
Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, The Chase by Louisa May Alcott, and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. See earlier comment re profligacy.

If you’ve made it this far, well done. If you’re going to have a go yourself, do say so in the ol’ comments whatsit.