Alan Hollinghurst: ‘I wrote letters to my schoolfriends in dwarfish runes’
My earliest reading memory
AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young. I knew most of the poems by heart from having them read to me, and I can still just capture the moment when chanting along and pretending to be able to read morphed magically into knowing and reading the words for myself.
My favourite book growing up
Anything by PG Wodehouse, but most of all the books about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, brilliantly played on TV in the 1960s by Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael. At school we all imitated both of them, and I carried on speaking like Jeeves for years, which must have become quite annoying for everyone else.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Fifteen Poets: From Chaucer to Arnold, a dreary-looking school anthology that opened up a new dimension for me, a lot of it – Milton’s sonnets, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson – learned by heart and remembered, a bit patchily, to this day. It was the way my teenage mind absorbed the workings of imagery, metaphor, structure, grammar itself: all the things I still depend on 55 years later.
The writer who changed my mind
Edmund White – or perhaps more accurately he opened my mind, in my late 20s, to the freedoms a gay writer could now take. I already had a strong sense of how exciting and valuable and necessary it might be to write about the unexplored world of gay life and history, and I absorbed A Boy’s Own Story like a shock, alarmed and thrilled by its truth-telling and the high style in which it was done.
The book that made me want to be a writer
The Wild Boys by William Burroughs. I don’t think I understood much of it at 19 but I was astounded by a whole new way of putting a book together, not to mention the weird sex. It set me off writing my first five or six experimental novels, none of which got much beyond chapter two. After a bit, I calmed down.
The book I reread
Penelope Fitzgerald’s miraculous Offshore – how can so short a book hold so much, and reveal so much more at a fourth or fifth reading? I struggled for years to emulate her economy, her conjuring of whole lives in a few deft strokes; but her gift is something too personal to be copied, and how she did it remains a beautiful mystery.
The book I could never read again
JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, read six times in succession when I was 12 or 13, in a kind of adolescent mania. I drew pictures of Gondor and Mordor, wrote letters to my schoolfriends in dwarfish runes. At the seventh go it was suddenly impossible, and I haven’t thought of attempting it since.
The book I discovered later in life
Having been snootily assured for decades that James Baldwin was a great essayist but “not a good novelist” I’ve been overwhelmed by my belated reading of all his novels – by their daring and their intensity, their stylistic virtuosity and the revelatory intelligence that informs every aspect of them. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is perhaps the one that most haunts my mind.
The book I am currently reading
I’m in the grip of Rachel Kushner’s coolly brilliant and suspenseful Creation Lake. It is, I suppose, a “novel of ideas”, a class of fiction I have never before found so wonderfully seductive.
My comfort read
It would be any large architectural book with a lot of pictures, and above all, plans, the more complicated the better. For an hour or two I can revert to my teenage fantasy of becoming an architect myself.
• Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Picador. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
