Sam Guglani: Reading Is A Gift

I say I’m a doctor, which still comes out with an apologetic cough, twenty years in. I’m unlikely to ever manage ‘writer.’ To me, medicine and writing are both necessary explorations of meaning in the world.

On Balance by Sinead Morrissey; The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman; H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker. But there’s a shelf of books waiting to be read. Then, downstairs, another room of them. I’m caught between terror and joy around all the things waiting to-be-read.

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. I was completely gripped by it, its maze of time and memory. I remember being very moved at the end, perhaps for the first time by a book, which was, in hindsight, precious and transforming. There was also this picture book, when I was much younger, in which a boy’s bed takes flight with his birthday balloons attached to it. It was beautiful, wondrous. I wish I knew its name and could find it again.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I read this when I was 17, studying for my Biology A’ Level and applying to medical school. It blew me away then, in its rendition of life and – whatever disparate arguments there are now around Dawkins ideas – the presentation of tectonic forces and layers beneath the pedestrian surface of humanity and the meaning we attach to it. It was dizzying.

Always a doctor (once I’d got over flight). But there was a particularly formative moment at school – the most formative moment? – when I was 14 and my English teacher read my short story out to the class. I felt, briefly, solid and connected, like I had a voice, and writing felt essential and important as a means towards this.

I used to think he’d feel disappointment but, more recently, I think he’d feel recognition, maybe even love. As T. S Eliot says: The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson: for its incitement to language, the idea and possibility of love, the belief in fairy tales, and the demonstration that life is both beautiful and cruel.

Not really! For me, the best reading (and writing) happens in accidental, almost stolen moments. I love the train, though, for both.

I haven’t one. It’s fitted and slotted around the day job and family life. Ideas and possibilities arrive half way through a long run or walk (or train journey!) – these things have a way of loosening rigid neural structures, finding metaphors and connections.

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. It showed me that there are numerous ways of interrogating reality, and that language has force even ahead of its rational content.

1. Actually do it: write. That sounds straightforward but … gosh! … the defences we mount against sitting down and doing that, exposing ourselves in that way, both to ourselves and others!

2. As per W.S. Graham’s advice, in his poem Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons: Do not expect applause.

The Bhagavad Gita; my father.

So many, depending on where I’m at, where they’re at. Books can be like drugs in that way, particular and precise and targeted.

Fiction. It’s so much truer.

Yes. Reading is a gift and, if you think about it, such a miracle, that we have it: marks on a page that reveal worlds, reveal us to ourselves, reveal others to us.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry: its sheer immersive storytelling, the amazing cast of characters, the Victorian world it inhabits which – surprise, surprise! – isn’t so different from ours, its brazen engagement with politics, its exploration of fear, and its love story which – to me, at heart – is one between science and religion, both gazing in wonder at an unfathomable world.

Are they not both real? But I prefer the physical object of a book, its paper: the touch and smell and weight of it, that it is a thing in the world, an opened Pandora’s Box.

So many, probably everything I’m still to read

Huge piles of to-be-reads.

‘Apologies.’

Image credit: Diana Patient