For four decades, I’ve kept notebooks recording details of every book I read. This quirk – or obsession – was begotten in January 1981. Manchester winter nights were long and dark and I was nursing twins round the clock. Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend is the first entry. After this came a Euripides binge. Whatever was I thinking of? Medea. Infanticide! The Bacchae. Dismemberment! Iphigenia. Female sacrifice! Oh dear. By February, I’d progressed to Greek comedy and can only hope my fits of giggles reassured the innocent babes.
I see that in the mid-1990s (the twins having survived my ministrations and entered adolescence), I’m revelling in Anne Tyler, Doris Lessing, Helen Dunmore and Jeanette Winterson. A blue notebook records immersion in the seventeenth century with Elizabeth Lilburne and Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fox and Katharine Chidley, as I research iI>Unbridled Spirits, my history of the women radicals of the English Civil War.
In a black notebook, things take a Germanic turn. At the Goethe Institute I’m relearning German, to research a novel, The Element of Water, before flying to Lübeck. I read Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, and Victor Klemperer’s I Shall Bear Witness. Later, in a hospital waiting room, I ponder Kafka’s The Trial: ‘a most appropriate place to read this,’ I note. After the all-clear, I get on the Big Wheel and soar above the city. When I return home, my twins cry with relief.
2000: I’m back home in Swansea, reading Nigel Jenkins’ Gwalia in Khasia and Jerry Hooker’s Imagining Wales. I attempt Jacqueline Wilson’s brilliant children’s stories in Elin Meek’s Welsh translations and write to Jacqueline, who, touchingly, writes back. Suddenly it’s 2007 and my mind’s in 1940s Egypt, researching Into Suez. Nawal El Saadawi (Woman at Point Zero) unforgettably visits Swansea to address our writing community. One twin accompanies me to Egypt, where we sail the Suez Canal.
2017: I’ve retired from teaching into a festival of free reading – books on whales and geology, music and the stars. In July 2020 lockdown, I lose myself in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Caroline Herschel is discovering comets in my sitting room, Humphry Davy invents his miner’s lamp, Faraday his battery, Babbage and Ada Lovelace the computer. Which brings me to the volume lying open now on my bedside table: Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack, today’s vital reading.
Stevie Davies is a novelist, literary critic, biographer and historian. She has twice been longlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Booker, and won the Fawcett Society Book Prize and the Wales Book of the Year (2002).
The Party Wall by Stevie Davies is the Books Council of Wales’ Book of the Month.
Available now from your local bookshop.