My Life in Books: Marina and Juliana

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Two! Today’s bloggers are:

Marina, who blogs at Finding Time To Write

Juliana, who blogs at The Blank Garden

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it. 

Marina: I grew up in a book-loving household, although my parents were the first in their generation to even go to secondary school, let alone university. My parents read me bedtime stories, especially Romanian fairy tales and children’s classics – although they would doze off long before I fell asleep. One of my favourite childhood books was The Little Prince, although I probably didn’t realise at the time just how sad it was. When I tried to read it to my own children, of course I was bawling and full of tears. My children looked very puzzled..

Juliana: I didn’t grow up in a book-loving household. None of my parents read books. None of them cared for books, really. In fact, they disregarded reading so much, that it was considered harmless. Fiction was never something to be taken seriously in my family. But everyone enjoyed to tell each other stories – particularly ghost tales and family stories – and storytelling was something very powerful that held us together.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren, is the first book that comes to my mind, whenever I am asked about my childhood favourites. Pippi was everything that I wanted to be at the time: red-haired, freckled, independent, “the strongest girl in the world”. She skipped classes whenever she wanted, made fun of the adults, and always resisted to conform to what they expected of her. It was impossible not to fall in love with Pippi!

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Marina: The first grown up book I remember reading was Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. It was on my parents’ bookshelf, because at some point somebody must have recommended all the famous English classics to them. So they bought all of Jane Austen and the Brontes, Vanity Fair and other such books. I don’t think they actually read Moll Flanders, so they had no idea what it was about, and were not aware that it might not be suitable for a 9-10 year old.

Juliana: Believe it or not, the first ‘grown-up’ book I read was actually… the Bible. For a long time, the only books we had at home were medical books, an old Bible, and an encyclopaedia. So, when I was about eight years old, and partly out of boredom and lack of alternatives, I decided I was old enough to set myself the goal of reading the Bible from cover to cover. I treated it as a conventional fictional book, to be read from the first page to the last. I didn’t understand any of it, but it sounded so different from what I had to learn at Sunday school, that I felt I was reading a forbidden book – and that feeling of trespassing was all that I needed to keep reading…

Another ‘grown-up’ book that comes to my mind is Family Ties, by Clarice Lispector – an author who had been recommended to me by a librarian. I was thirteen, and it was the first time I felt that an author had, in a strange way, written something about me that, until then, I had never been able to put into words. Something about feeling lonely, about not fitting in, and about all the things we never find words for. I don’t think I understood this book either, and I don’t remember my thoughts on it. But I remember what I felt.

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Marina: I ended up studying Japanese at university almost by accident (I was planning to study Scandinavian languages) but the book that made me fall in love with Japanese literature and made me stop regretting the Norwegians was the short story collection Hashire Merosu (Run, Melos!) by Dazai Osamu.

One story in that collection in particular completely changed the way I thought about unreliable narrators: it is a story told from Judas Iscariot’s point of view. I attempted to translate it (probably very badly) and it got me writing again (although after I finished university I stopped writing again for many, many years).

Juliana: A book that left a great impression on me in my early 20s was The Life of the Mind, by Hannah Arendt – an unfinished book in which she explored the basic faculties of the mind (contemplation, will, judgment), so as to understand the relationship between thinking and morality. I had been looking for women philosophers, and she was the first that came up on my research. They had this book at my university library, the topic seemed interesting enough, and I had some boring summer holidays ahead of me.

From the first pages, I was completely taken in by Arendt’s her writing style: unlike the dry books I had been reading for Uni, Hannah’s voice was fresh, bookish, passionate, and full of life. It changed the way I thought about academic writing and research; it reminded me of why I had fallen in love with philosophy and ethics; and it gave a new insight on what I wanted to do with my life.

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?

Marina: Blogging has enabled me to discover so many new and marvellous books, so I have lots of new favourites! I started blogging in 2012 as a way to hold myself accountable for writing regularly. So initially my blog was mainly about poems and flash fiction. Then I started reviewing more and more books, especially once I started reviewing for Crime Fiction Lover and Necessary Fiction and other such places. I had to find an outlet for all the books I was reading for personal enjoyment rather than just the ‘review copies’, so I started using my blog for that. My most recent favourite discovery is the Transylvanian trilogy by Miklos Banffy – I became completely immersed in that vanished world.

Juliana: Two recent favourites that come to my mind are There Were No Windows, by Norah Hoult, which I read in 2016, and The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns, which I read in 2017. I would probably never have heard of those books, if I had not been introduced to the book blogging community.

When I started reading book blogs, back in 2006/ 2007, I knew nothing about Persephone Books or Virago Modern Classics – books I am now completely obsessed with! I guess blogging has made literature wider (and wilder) for me – and it surrounded me with kindred spirits who understand and share some of my bookish obsessions.

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Marina: I have such eclectic tastes that I don’t think anything I read would surprise people. Everyone knows I love genre fiction (especially crime) and poetry, but you might not be aware how much I adore T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. I didn’t have a cat when I first read it, but I could tell that T. S. Eliot really knew his feline companions. Of course, it helps that in my student days I was part of a production of the musical Cats, which was considered ‘subversive Capitalism’ at the time and was promptly closed down after just a couple of performances.

Juliana: I think people may be surprised to know that Agatha Christie is one of my favourite authors. When I was a teenager, I read all of Agatha’s books I could find at my local library. Every time I pick one of her books, it feels like coming back home.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Marina on Juliana’s choices: Well, I actually like all of his or her chosen favourites (I nearly chose Pippi Longstocking myself as one of my childhood favourites and I always enjoy relaxing with an Agatha Christie). So I think this is someone who is an eclectic reader, and who likes to challenge themselves intellectually as well as let down their guard occasionally. I would recommend one of my very latest discoveries, which is wonderfully relaxing, but by no means simplistic: Old Baggage by Lissa Evans. It’s amusing, but with underlying sadness – the story of a former indomitable Suffragette who finds herself without a cause in 1928. So she creates one… and gets into trouble with it, for she is a bit like a bull in a china shop.

Juliana on Marina’s choices: I found these choices so intriguing! From the list, I’ve only read The Little Prince (also one of my childhood favourites) and Moll Flanders. Most of the books chosen seem to explore moral questions in a way or another, so this must be a very thoughtful reader… I guess this blogger is someone deeply interested in modern classics and literature in translation – and someone who loves cats! Maybe someone with a British background and with a wide range of interests? It’s difficult to guess… The only thing I know is that this is someone whose blog I should be reading! I see that one of this reader’s recent favourites is a modern classic written by a Hungarian author, so I would recommend The Door, by Magda Szabo, tr. Len Rix (2005): a novel in translation that explores moral questions in a powerful way.