Philip Pullman: ‘I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch’

The author of His Dark Materials on the life lessons in George Eliot’s masterpiece, ditching Lawrence Durrell and being wowed by Ginsberg

My earliest reading memory
I must have been read, probably by my mother, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and Kipling’s rhythms must have got into my memory, because I remember looking at the story How the Camel Got His Hump and experiencing the words gradually matching the sounds in my mind. I was six, and on board ship to join my father, an RAF officer stationed in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

My favourite book growing up
Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Three Twins, which was the sequel to his great Emil and the Detectives. It was only much later that I realised why that book had such a deep effect on me: like mine, Emil’s mother had been widowed, and he didn’t want her to marry again. I had no idea of the parallel then.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/wzM5a6s