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Wendy Cope, award-winning poet and ex-student of St Hilda’s, gives Etcetera an idea of her reading habits.
Posted 3rd June 2009 | Author: Gini Sharvill and Claire Little
(Views: 115)
Wendy Cope, award-winning poet and ex-student of St Hilda’s, gives Etcetera an idea of her reading habits. We asked:
What is your favourite book...
...ever?
The Collected Poems of A.E.Housman, and Jane Austen’s Emma, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. I love most of her heroes, though I have reservations about Darcy, and I also have a special fondness for Mr Harding in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels.
...to curl up on the sofa with?
I remember a very happy day when I stayed in and read the whole of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
...to read on a train?
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. It was the perfect book for a train journey to France – long, enjoyable and light to carry.
...to give as a gift?
I recently gave Love, Life, Goethe by John Armstrong to two young men who had just finished university. It is both a biography and a superior self-help book and I thought it would help them at that point in their lives.
...to make you laugh?
Geoffrey Willans, author of the Molesworth books.
...to help a broken heart?
The poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sophie Hannah.
Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy. And, though I probably shouldn’t mention this, I’m told some of my poems help.
...to provoke your frustration?
John Jarndyce in Bleak House doesn’t get the love and happiness he deserves. And I can’t help wishing that Dorothea and Lydgate would get together in Middlemarch. I also think J.M.Coetzee is overrated. I’ve only read two of his books – Disgrace and
Diary of a Bad Year – and hated both of them. His other books may be better but I have little inclination to try them.
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