Join the Shenanigans, this Friday in Central London!

 

I can't believe I've not mentioned this yet. I'm reading my story The Corrective Tender, alongside the wonderful Jonathan Kemp (London Triptych), Joe Lidster (Torchwood, and more) and Rupert Smith (among other things, Man's World). It's this Friday evening - that's right, almost upon us! Do come along!

We'll all be reading from a new collection edited by Paul Magrs, Shenanigans: Gay Men Mess WithGenre. I'm sure you've got a copy of it, already, what with its assortment of unusual and unnerving characters: tipsy lady sleuths, angry vigilantes, and of course, the beautiful agents of the Corrective Tender itself...

The details of Friday's reading are on this website:

http://www.meetup.com/galhagroup/events/117155242/

It's run by the Gay Humanists Association, but you don't need to be a member to attend, and it's free - so you have no good reason not to come. It'll make a wonderful start to your weekend.

You can also lend me some moral support. I haven't read my fiction aloud to strangers for nearly a decade! Last time, it was at a local writers' Open Mic in Brighton, one chilly evening, upstairs at the lovely Marlborough Hotel. I hadn't told anyone I was going, and as the room filled with people, I began to wish I'd stayed at home. We read onstage in a big armchair with a microphone hidden somewhere in one of its wings, and I did a story called In Love With The Starry Eyed. It was about a woman who has a fling with a man whose car takes them back to Brighton in the 1950s. It wasn't that good, but I still like the title very much.

Unfortunately, I hadn't timed myself beforehand, and I began to overrun my slot quite badly. I could see Simon, the burly chap who ran the night, sighing and tutting and looking at his watch, and I began to read faster and faster, cutting out lines that I thought weren't necessary, and then having to improvise when I realised I'd missed an integral bit of story.

There was a lovely reaction, and back on my little cabaret-style table, a lady with bobbed silver hair and big lapels told me I had to get an agent, don't take any rubbish, go and get an agent, and tell them how it needs to be. She wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways, unfortunately, and there was even a young woman who came up to me and said nice things, but was suddenly subsumed under my rather tiddly companion's rant about publishers and agents who had done her wrong.

It was exciting, though, and even though I'm feeling nervous about Friday, I'm also really looking forward to it (and I have timed myself this time, don't worry). 

I'm only sorry we can't have everybody there for Shenanigans at the Conway Hall: Paul the editor, Stuart the publisher, and the authors of some of the other creepy, funny, clever stories in the book. And most of all, Mark Manley, whose gorgeous cover art is like a window onto an extraordinary hostelry of soft lights and crossed genres, a funny, sexy celebration of the queer imagination.

Will you be there?

 

The (first) End of the Tales ... Significant Others and Sure of You, by Armistead Maupin

This autumn Random House will publish The Days of Anna Madrigal, by Armistead Maupin. It will be the ninth entry in Maupin’s series set in San Francisco, a series I have been re-reading (and in the later stages, just reading) in which Anna Madrigal, bohemian landlady of the house on Barbary Lane, is one of the few constants in a vortex of event, emotion and intoxicating smoke.

Before 2007, Sure of You would have been considered the final book in the series, and I did try to read it in that spirit. It ends, interestingly, not on a note of closure and finality but openness and uncertainty. The most pleasurable uncertainty, perhaps: flirtation. If a strange impulse stirred in me, during books 3 and 4, to see Anna’s tenants come together in their old ways, under the same old shingled roof in Barbary Lane, Sure of You firmly exorcised that. After nearly a decade, the rootless and bootless boys and girls who huddled under Anna’s wing have flown the nest and found their places in life.

And since these novels are intimately linked with the city by the sea, it’s time to decide whether San Francisco itself only represents the spirit of their wilder youth, the fantasies of other people, the idealism of 60s utopian thinking – or do they have a future there? Does it represent a dream that needs to be kept alive?

There is a lot of acrimony and even some regret and nostalgia in the (original) concluding novel – but where would this series be without drama? And ultimately the characters are left stronger, however hard the blow that falls, or that they must deliver. If they can’t always be sure of one another, they are surer than ever of themselves. I hope that doesn’t sound like a platitude – it’s a hard task for all of them, and in the face of the AIDs epidemic and the Reagan administration, it’s a political act too. To accept yourself and your obligations, to friends, lovers, and communities.

It’s been harder and harder not to talk about the ‘spoiler’ aspects and revelations of these books. I can’t recommend them enough, and they do depend on some of these secrets and surprises. Some characters have surpassed their own expectations and ours; some have been tested, in more than one sense. In the last three novels of the sequence, though, growing awareness of AIDs has become a major theme, taking the life of a major character, changing the outlook of people who were part of a mass sexual liberation. The last four novels in the sequence have documented this slow shift in consciousness. It seems odd to look back now to the earlier, soapier sequence where Brian was hospitalised due to a homophobic assault. By the end of Sure of You, certain friends’ awareness of mortality, their preparation for it, and their intensified love and anger, made this a highly emotional read. I was in tears after nearly every chapter.

Sure of You draws together characters from each of the prior books, with some surprises. I was pleased to see more focus given to Anna Madrigal herself, on holiday with Mona (on the island of Lesbos, naturally). Once again, though, we never see the world through her eyes. Anna hasn’t had a storyline of her own since the first book; although there are big revelations about her past in the second and third novels, and she helps kidnap a news reporter in book three – and ends book five chaining herself to a piece of SF history – she has never quite lost that air of mystery, perhaps part of her maternal role. She is the one who responds, reassures, following her duties to children, animals and wooden steps, guarding her own feelings while her children trade theirs in confessionals or bitter arguments.

And in her self-assurance, her many transformations, her wild history, her glorious household, her prodding toward risk, her lighting back to safety, she represents a sort of ideal to strive toward: bravery, love and complete disregard for convention. There have been two succeeding novels since Sure of You, and I look forward to reading them (one of which will be a re-read – but it should feel utterly different in this context) but especially to The Days of Anna Madrigal, and to getting under the skin of one of my favourite characters in fiction.

Meanwhile, I’ve started reading Maupin’s first non-Tales novel, Maybe the Moon, and Patrick Gale’s Outlines biography of Maupin, which (a couple of chapters in) is an absolutely treat.

The above image is from the AIDs Memorial Quilt. The website is here, and links to a new digitised, searchable version of the Quilt: http://www.aidsquilt.org/

'Just Reading A Book Is Unlikely To Disturb The Universe - But Not Impossible...' The Eighth Doctor's Adventures in Print

Doctor Who will be a very old telly show this November. Rather impressively, it has the joie de vivre of something only just conjured up: check out the front page headlines about the current Doctor’s departure. I’m celebrating the anniversary with probably my favourite kind of Who: the novels that carried, renewed and spun the torch like a majorette’s baton while the series was off air.

I started my reading marathon with recent history: new novels for the Eleventh, Tenth, Ninth Doctors. Since then, I’ve been visiting the era of the Eighth, and that’s another kettle of fish. If it feels like the Ninth Doctor, with thirteen episodes, had too little time on the stage (and even the Eleventh, you feel, has barely begun) consider Paul McGann. He played the Doctor for One Night Only in 1996, in a pilot that never went to series. The story was pants, but McGann was fantastic in it (you can picture Paul McGann being fantastic in pants, can’t you?). Guileless and dangerous, he was fresh and fizzy as a bottle of ginger pop, just opened.

The pilot failed but the books were there to continue the story. From one runaround, BBC authors spun a character that would carry seven years of adventures in print (not to mention comics and audio plays). They even rewrote stuff that solitary TV story came up with (mainly some odd stuff about his parentage). They took charge. It wasn’t plain sailing, for writers or readers. This Doctor only existed in his own spin-offs, so there was no room for nostalgia or deconstruction. One of fiction’s most mercurial characters had been given license (even an obligation) to act completely without precedent.

It was a better book line than book series. Many individual titles did wonderful things, but a story arc is a big thing to navigate across a monthly series, like throwing an elephant from peak to peak of the Himalayas. I remember feeling increasingly lost and dispirited at the time, when succeeding novels failed to live up to the potential of big switch-hitters. But I do miss the anticipation, and the ructions and excitement of the most successful titles. Nowadays the tone of the show is fairly level, year on year, but Who was once defined by variety, and the daring of individual authors.

It was so nice to go back to these books, and remind myself of the scale they were working on. The Scarlet Empress takes in a whole world, exploring each region - from the city of 1001 nights to the forest of shaven bears down to their roots - going into the history and voice of nearly every character, luxuriating in detail rich and strange. And of course, it's interrogating the Doctor - how can you go on, doing the mad things you do, and how can you stay so ever-young in the wake of so many stories? Why are we all in love with you and your adventures? Would you approve of us? Do you think of yourself as we do, as a motif, a device, an emblem?

And of course it introduces Iris Wildthyme, in the midst of this, and is wonderfully funny - and somehow tender too. There really is nothing like this novel.

And at another extreme, The Year of Intelligent Tigers explores one island in a world of oceans, an island barely understood by the humans who have colonised it, but a place with secrets and secret keepers, and a real encounter with the alien. When the Tigers begin talking back, the human colonists are faced with a really radical encounter - and Orman reproduces that (mirrors it in several directions, in fact) in one man's romantic love for the Doctor, a man who (by this point in the series) has created an identity around his own amnesia. Orman's careful attention to the character of the Doctor is really affecting, and sometimes his companions and his reader (his fan!) are brought into quite an uncomfortable relationship with this extraordinarily moral, passionate, unfathomable man.

Magrs and Orman are two of the writers fandom should count itself lucky to have had. Like David Whitaker, Robert Holmes, Marc Platt, they are writers who evidently respond strongly to certain ideas and contradictions in the hearts of the Doctor's character: they evoke him and his world superbly, but they also explore it thoroughly. Their work deserves a good deal more space and thought than I can give it here.

I've always felt that the Doctor's mystery defined him: that we should never quite have the measure of him, always be standing with the companion and feeling unsettled by his difference. Yet Tigers is the story of his disaffection, and requires him to be perfectly transparent (for all that he's impossible to empathise with, I think). And Empress takes us into his confidence, presents him as someone with a shakey grasp on his own chronology, who improvises and extemporises so often that he has little interiority of his own, no cherished memories or plans for the future: liberated by that, perhaps. One passage surprised me by talking about his fear: 'He wasn't, unlike some of the previous Doctors, convinced of his own superhuman faculties. He wasn't superhuman or even particularly brave. Not always.' Then he remembers some of his most recent adventures: 'He must be a fairly adventurous soul all in all, he decided happily.'

If he is decidedly non-superhuman, the Doctor, does it make him more human?

EarthWorld is an oddity, because it wasn't a re-reading: I skipped it on publication because it felt so ordinary, compared to the wild excess of its predecessors. How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen time travelling voodoo Time Lords execute Jon Pertwee? Will you settle for a comedy caper featuring android princesses: Buffy meets This Life and The Space Museum?

But EarthWorld's reissue (for the anniversary! see, it's not just me) is a nice reminder of what satisfying things even the more conventional novel can do with Doctor Who, that the TV series will never get close to.

With a much nicer cover and the benefit of hindsight (or perhaps, more reasonable expectations), I read the opening pages and was instantly won over. It's light and fast and very early-2000s, all irreverence and irony. Unlike some of the novels of this era, there's no ego - in fact, Rayner's own Introduction is perhaps overly-modest - and the best of the novel is its character work. The new perspective of Anji sends bolts of energy into the novel, and it feels like the smartest and funniest of New Who.

Such a long blog post - and barely a word about Iris Wildthyme - about women writers (the Eighth Doctor's era had six - the highest ratio to male writers of any of the show's eras) - and I haven't talked about my great bugbear at the moment, which is the continued non-availability of these stories and their diminishing role in Who fandom. These are fantastic, beautiful, accomplished novels, and some of the most ambitious ones have real insights about their hero and the stories Who tells.

I was able to buy Intelligent Tigers new in a print-on-demand edition, in Waterstones, and of course EarthWorld was one of his year's re-releases. I hope they are both the start of a republishing venture by the BBC - or somebody! - because their value shouldn't be indicated in a price on eBay (and their authors are probably due some pennies).

And there are readers out there who deserve these books...

 

Oh, and look at this gorgeous illustration by David A. Roach - one of the little 'prelude' illustrations that Doctor Who Magazine used to run...

A Pile of Puffins ... Carrie's War, by Nina Bawden

The funny thing is, I thought I knew Carrie’s War. The world is held together with these vague memories and assumptions, isn’t it? Let’s keep it to books: navigating the bookshop, finding your way, you have to turn away from a table of things that, without reading, you know you won’t like – or things you’ve read before. And things you love change as you re-read them. There are things that I still think of as favourites that I haven’t read since I was a gay young thing. I took The World and Other Places off a bookshelf yesterday – not the copy I first owned, given to a friend after she took and read it to a friend on a camping holiday. I remember loving it, and that’s part of who I am, and I would still recommend it, even though I haven’t looked inside it for a while.


Carrie’s War always seemed to turn up in charity shops and boot sales when I was a kid. On those summer holidays in Bournemouth, rooting round in the cardboard boxes on the floor of the former Pentecostal Free church on Ashley Road. Any Puffin logo spotted on a spine, I would lever out, and it seemed it was nearly always this.

I was never inclined to read it because I had a kneejerk reaction to stories about war – as a developing reader I had some sense (I remember this almost physically) that Carrie’s war would be separate to the World War. But I was disturbed by that blackened skull she was holding in the cover photo, in what seemed a stolen moment – a moment of curiosity, impulsive, Blytonish but macabre.

And years later – because I knew it was a favourite book of a good friend – I brought home the audiocassette from the library. I listened a lot that year: The TV Kid, The Tulip Touch, The Kingdom by the Sea. I love audiocassettes (not just audiobooks – but the whirr, whirr, whirr click at the end of each side). And I listened to Carrie’s War, and I thought I had my whole attention on it. I even talked about it in various PhD proposals, unchallenged. And then I was talking to someone else about it, and I realised – no! I’d lost my way somewhere...

I had followed it as far as Carrie and her brother’s first meeting with Hepzibah Green in the mysterious house at Druid’s Bottom, the house that holds all the secrets of her war: love, guilt, fear, loyalty, betrayal. I had been all attention, of course, when they venture down into the woods, where ‘an older religion’ still charged the air with mystery, and there was the sense of something greater than them all, breathing into the darkness. For the last couple of years, I’ve been sensitised to those moments of archaeological imagination, of folk religion’s power.

And it was a strange thing to hear – to read again – in this beautiful novel, because along with the notes of real uncanny power in Hepzibah, there is a sense of openness to mystery that the rest of the novel seems to be about making an escape from, finding redemption from. The old values of Chapel, female modesty, superstition, even laws of inheritance, are shown to be an old world, at best paralysing and at worst poisonous for the young people it touches. It’s a novel shadowed with male anger: Carrie incurs the wrath of her brother, her friend and Mr Evans, the man she’s evacuated to live under. But the women of the novel – who sometimes have more reason to be angry – accept and understand her, and all of them slip away from the heavy weight of Mr Evans’ anger somehow.

I had not forgotten the sheer breath-holding beauty of that opening chapter, in the present day, the stillness of the day, the strange sense of dislocation shared by Carrie, her children, and the reader – the dislocation of pieces coming together in surprising ways, rich with melancholy, and the rich mystery of another person’s past. That was still there, of course, but I had somehow missed the pure flashing anger that Carrie experiences, in that brilliant, regrettable moment with the skull – and the remorse, later, when she talks to Mr Evans, the day before they go.

It’s such a short novel, but moving gently manages to express such a complexity of experience. And even though I’d read plenty of blitz novels, evacuation novels, novels about having to go to the countryside and leave your home – still Bawden avoids cliché at every note. Perhaps the trace of real magic in the woods is part of the novel's validation of Carrie’s most irrational feelings. From not missing home to protecting a mini-despot to misunderstanding one relationship to the experience of a first deep crush, and beyond, there are plenty of times when Carrie behaves irrationally or surprisingly, and Bawden shows them all to be natural – even being a stranger to yourself.

Between the leaves ... Bookmarks and Keepsakes

We come back to bookmarks. We leave them, sometimes in the heat of the moment, between chapters, as the bus arrives at our stop. Later, our fingers search for the familiar touch. Hardly think about it, but recognition: we're back. And perhaps it's more than a day later, perhaps several years, on a different bus in another town, and the bookmark brings us back to that moment precisely.

Sometimes a bookmark is just a bookmark. Look at that one from Skoob, with a handy map on the reverse. Because I go to Skoob several times a year, that's not exactly a moment in time being pinpointed (though I think, because it was inside a Mollie Hunter, that I picked it up the day I went with Hunter's label-mate Roy Gill). That said, the Bookmongers bookmark - from Brixton - is such a thing of beauty I have it on a pinboard, not even in a book.

And then there's that Hogarthian Room of Ones Own Inc. I've never been there. In the imagination it's more splendid than Skoob and Bookmongers combined, though such a place could only exist in the imagination...

Yes, that's really what I'm talking about, today. Not my bookmarks but the ones others have left behind. Like this Glyndebourne card receipt for Ms Julia Aries, uncovered in a Mary Webb novel. I've been to Glyndebourne actually - yes, I can hardly believe it either - and it's such a strange, unreal space, and any visit you make is fixed in your memory, who you were with, what you saw, the pic-nic you had, and what you talked about in that long interval in the twilight between arias. Was Julia reading Gone to Earth that evening? Were the two associated?

Sometimes the link is very strong, like this obituary for the great silent movie star, Louise Brooks, which I found long ago in a her autobiography. Brooks had the most extraordinary life: a star at the height of the flickering firmament, muse for a German director, then snubbed by Hollywood, forgotten, believed dead, belatedly feted by ardent cinephiles.

And can't you just imagine an ardent someone trimming that obituary from the paper and slipping it in this book, with a heavy sigh?

Some associations are more obscure. Why does my copy of Carrie's War have a £10 Monopoly note between its pages? What about this photograph, tiny, which fell out of  something - bugger me, if I can remember what book it was - showing Observation Point - Grand Canyon - Vancouver, B.C.?

And tinier still, perhaps my favourite. In a Brighton charity shop, a shop for an AIDs charity, a young me hunted through the many gay-themed books on the shelf, lighting upon a small pornographic novel from the 60s entitled Young Knights by Sir Todd Ritchards (sample line: 'Then Torre knelt between the legs and taking the small jar he had nearby, opened it and reached in and withdrew a kind of lotion Todd had remembered using when polishing silver in Lyoness.') It has a lot of black and white photo illustrations, and on the opening page, 'To Tony with love Rob xxx'

Are you tantalised by what might have been left among the pages of this mucky little touchstone? Simply a bus ticket, a single, in August, for the Maidstone & Dist. Motor Services Ltd. 26 pence, I think.

And right away, I'm there on that bus - I'm travelling through Maidstone, maybe heading to Hastings, Faversham or Tenterden, and I'm carrying this book with me. I'm probably reading it on the back seat. Or am I giving it to somebody, while we're waiting at the stop, saying goodbye, trying not to make it obvious to the other passengers? It's a tiny ticket - when I was hunting it out tonight, I thought with a sinking heart that I'd lost it. It would be easy to lose - but it made it to me, and hopefully I'll keep it there...

I thought I'd write about things found in books - marking a place or a time. I found this green bookmark yesterday, made by John Paul, probably in 1991 when Street Fighter II was released and the Simpsons were surrounded by an aura of cool although nobody at my school had seen an episode.

The bookmark was in a Reader - something I should talk about on here properly, before the blog closes. I'm especially fond of Classroom Readers because they're designed to engage the imagination and then be discarded. Most of us will have read one from some reading scheme. Last year I was fascinated to find that the same woman - Sheila McCullagh - wrote most of the ones I'd heard of: the houses with red, blue or yellow gables (denoting reading fluency), the red, blue or yellow pirates, the blue, green, orange and purple Puddle Lane books, Tim and the Hidden People.

Yes, I'll talk about that another time - but here was a book that was made to be put aside, and here was the bookmark inside it, and 'street' in Street Fighter II is spelled wrong... And you wonder, don't you, where John Paul is now, what he's reading now, and what he remembers of 1991.

We come back to bookmarks... What have you found?

Killers and Queens ... Further Tales of the City, and Babycakes, by Armistead Maupin

I read the first four Tales books in my early teens. I'm clocking up three decades in June, so that's quite a while ago. There have been a lot of books under the bridge since then, so it's interesting to revisit them: it would be odd to remember them all individually after so long, let alone to have the same taste.

(Or would it? I do find it interesting how formative reading, literary taste, character and memory intermingle. Anyway...)

In my memory they're a homogenous entity, but the striking thing about coming back to Barbary Lane has been the changes and discontinuity across the series.

Discontinuity? Well, after Tales and More Tales, Further Tales suddenly leaps a year in its characters' lives, refining its tangled narrative and jettisoning a central character. The leap was only noticeable because I moved straight from one book to another - a reminder of its origin as magazine serial - but it's no subtle adjustment: More builds to a romance between X and Y, but in Further, X is gone and Y's already with Z!

Further also moves away from the entwined kiss and tell and enter a jockey shorts competition and don't tell stories of the first books, with multiple characters involved  in a thriller sprouting outrageously from a nasty episode in American history. It's a bold statement from Maupin. The series can no longer be mistaken for a sit-com waiting to happen (intriguing to read that this was once on the cards). It's a Great American Novel taking the form and flamboyance of serial and soap as it pleases.

It's a chronicle of American history, not merely of the Reagan administration but the long slow death of sixties idealism in the hearts of those who believed in it most. Jonestown represents that, bitterly, but Mouse and Brian come to articulate it more convincingly. In my blog about the first books I talked about its liberating new model families. I'd forgotten how sad these books get too.

It's intriguing to find, in what might be the Queer Canterbury Tales, a straight man's renunciation of promiscuity and his search for self given such centrality. Meanwhile, another sudden leap between Further and Babycakes brings Mouse sharply into the great 20th Century historical shift of the gay community. Once again, the jump is surprisingly abrupt, but Maupin's depiction of Mouse is so accomplished, the reader hardly cares.

Babycakes continues the move in Further Tales toward a more streamlined narrative, and Mouse's adventures in London are actually a little lacklustre, but oddly enough I think it's Maupin's best writing of the sequence so far. Mouse, Brian, Mary Ann and (at last!) Mona are so changed from their original appearances, but flawless studies, real as friends and as surprising, with Mary Ann's story particularly unravelling like a clock winding up to strike.

It was a bedtime read for the first three books, but the fourth had to come out with me. I read it on the bus, the Tube, the loo, desperate to know what happened next - because in-between the adventure (slightly hackneyed, this time), the conversations between characters were so compelling.

And I'm still reading on - here come Significant Others...

Meanwhile, all these paintings are the work of Joan Brown, one of the San Francisco figuratives, I believe - I'd never seen her work before but I wanted a SF artist, and I love these. The one at the stop has a fantastic story behind it, too...

Soft hearted ... For the love of paperbacks (a top ten)

What’s your preference, the hardback or paper- edition? You may remember me saying that, with some exceptions, I’d have the latter. I’d go further and say my fervour for books is all tied up in my love of paperbacks, the effect they’ve had on publishing, the experience of dipping into, flipping through them, riffling, sifting, thumbing and exchanging. And so, in the spirit of my last post, I thought I’d choose a top ten of them.

There are, of course, too many to choose from. Paperbacks are part of an inky pulpy boom. Where hardbacks build hierarchies, for me, paperbacks tumble them: they reprint, re-cover, they bring in the new, they foster subcultures. Paperbacks are physically redolent of readers’ affection: they crease, crack and crumble under use. They are annotated without a qualm. Paperbacks are given away, thoughtlessly, to charity shops and secondhand places, scooped up in house clearances; they and their readers and their readings, their lives, proliferate.

Proliferate even sounds like someone flicking through a yellowed paperback looking for their favourite quotation, underlined in biro.

The Face in the Frost is a wonderful example. For starters, I love everything about the front cover – and it’s a great novel too, an early work by fab children’s novelist, John Bellairs. I didn’t expect to find it anywhere, so was thrilled to get a copy via internet bookswapping website Bookmooch. Something good about this novel being unwanted in the US and winging its way over to me.

But this isn’t that copy – this is the copy I found (surprise) in a ramshackle bookshop in Hastings. How did it get there? You’ll see it has a notch taken out of it – a sign it once belonged to a Book Exchange – and the idea of that coming and going, the imprint left on it like a sailor’s tattoo, made me love it even more.

And like the pulp fantasy novel, the children’s book, for me, is paperback. Puffin, Dragon and Lion – to name a handful – led the way in democratising good literature for children, enabling it to be read more widely, with less ceremony. I had to restrict myself here: these could all be books that slipped through school library shelves or were passed from hand to hand, that kept an old classic alive or put it on the same shelf as Joan Aiken.

The book I chose was The Borrowers Afield, a favourite in any case, but I first read it in a giant omnibus which feels like a family Bible. My friend Rosie sent me this. It made me recognise the novel itself. Now I associate it, and its wonderful illustrations, directly with her - and her wonderful Borrower-eye photographs of flowers, ferns and trees.

Actually, three of these are gifts. Not that hardback books make poor presents – the reverse is true – but there is something tender and tactile about a paperback. My friend Ben sent me this copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by my favourite writer of short stories, Grace Paley. This was my introduction to her, in fact, and again I associate it with Ben, as much as I do that prior readership, which, because it’s Virago, I feel immense fondness for.

And Twelve Stories was a Christmas present from the author, in the first year of our friendship. Like most of the books in this list, it’s unostentatious – it’s slender and silvery and from a small (ish) press. But in a year that Paul seemed to be writing big characters – Brenda, Iris, Dr Who – this was a reminder of smaller, quieter stories of his, that I’d loved for years, such as the closely observed denizens of a cafe in Florence, and the story that became Exchange (both heard, ephemerally, on the radio). It was a small paperback freighted with old and new memories.

Paperbacks can be huge too, while still being more manageable and less grand than a huge hardback. Black Water is one of the books of my life, if that’s not too pretentious a term. I vividly remember buying it in Brighton on a black cloud day, sprinting through the raindrops to the coach station, and just being led, page by page, into the world of Alberto Manguel’s obsessions. It was a book that felt endless, but for once, not dauntingly. Inexhaustibly. Gloriously. I love almost every story, and I love picking it up to revisit them.

And Titus Groan! Gormenghast is at its best in paperback. They’ve brought out all those books in a giant hardback edition now, and I can’t think why, because how on Earth do you even lift it? Penguin do outsize editions sometimes, but the majority of lengthy novels just feel dense with words, heavy, peculiar. And these paperback Peakes are all part of his life story, his rediscovery, his second wind. It’s all the colours of Gormenghast: the silver, the black, the yellow-green of Peake’s own writing paper reproduced on the cover, and the butter-gold of the pages themselves.

Here’s another Penguin. I had to have two. This one is wonderful for being so much of its time. Juicy orange covers, and that cute little illustration, signalling the oddness and naturalness of Quatermass' sf horror tv being suitable for reproduction in this terribly proper paperback range. Paperback is the first shift beyond genre and hierarchy. The lists on Penguin and Faber inside covers are always fascinating, running the gamut of a reader’s potential library.

I had to include this book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It’s a book that feels slightly odd in the hands, because it’s heavy and square and slightly glossy. I love Sendak’s work, love its peculiarity, its humanity, its arty ugliness: I have another edition of Grimm illustrated by Peake and introduced by Russell Hoban, and it may seem like the oddest area of your library to duplicate, but this edition is such a perfect match, so beautiful. It’s a rare instance of real book lust for me.

The Well and Badly Loved, which might describe my paperback fixation, is like Paul’s book: new, slender, tactile, written by a friend. Well, if we’re getting detailed, the introduction is by me, so I suppose it’s extra selfishly special to me – but essentially, this is Ben Webb on the page: it’s poetic, melancholy, funny, and deeply, inconsolably personal. It reminds me of my poetry fixation – that I’m so out of the habit of now – those Faber’s and Carcanets and Bloodaxes, light as a chocolate bar, but richly, darkly, sweet or bitterly beautiful. I love it.

And finally, this little book by Anne Fadiman, a book about books, another one resembling a Dairy Milk bar, with its gorgeous pink wrapper. I remember buying it in Borders (I remember Borders! Do you?), one evening when I was a student and embarking on this strange relationship with books, and the opening essay – about marrying bookshelves – reminded me I was into books for the ‘wrong’ as well as ‘right’ reasons, for irrational reasons, books as people, things and memory boxes. I felt quite comradely with Fadiman when I read it, and I still do.

This list could go on forever, in along, beautiful, portable, touchable list. So what’s your preference – and what are your favourites?