Doris Lessing is absolutely right. To be a writer, one has to necessarily be a reader.
... I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."
But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
Here is her acceptance speech as reprinted in full by the Guardian.
Last Friday, I attended my first shabbas. Bar three, everyone around the table was, naturally, Jewish. Now the JAP stereotype exists in Hijack City, and the breed is known as the kugel - exemplified by materialistic women with shopping on their minds, preferably for shoes, clothes and jewellery. The male counterpart would, as the stereotype goes, be obsessed with making money and showing that he's making money.
However, at last Friday's shabbas, after the obligatory exchange of horror stories - who got shot/robbed/hijacked/raped/all of the above - in Hijack City this week - the discussion turned to books. I was impressed by the passion the younger guests evinced for reading. There was this 21-year old guy who was around 100 pages into Shantaram, and he simply couldn't bear to put the book down, even if he had some 800 pages to go. He was just so enamoured of the prose, and the story itself - it was really quite heartwarming to see in these kids what Lessing called a hunger for books.
As Lessing said, she was raised in a mud hut whose walls were lined with books. While the hut of my childhood in les tropiques was of the concrete variety, it was similarly lined with books - my mother, in particular, read widely, from cheesy romances and breezy bestsellers to political history and alternative spirituality. By the time I was in third grade I knew all about "psychic phenomena" and "ESP", courtesy of my mother's brief interest in the paranormal - and what a nauseating little show-off I was in school about my newly-acquired esoteric knowledge. When my mother began to dabble in photography, I, too, began to discover the the marvelously focused worlds of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Steiglitz, Ernst Haas, Richard Avedon and the like - all through the beautiful books she brought home.
My own children adore books, and like me, could spend several blissful hours in a bookstore. My little one knows who built the pyramids, thanks to a lovely book she chose a few years ago. That one book seems to have awakened an abiding interest in Egypt and antiquities. My older daughter scans the books bursting out of the shelves at home and already the more memorable titles stand out as invitations to be read. Last night she asked me if Gods Behaving Badly was appropriate reading for her age. If not for the scenes of by-now-banal carnality between Aphrodite and Apollo - they have been copulating for some millenia now, remember - I might have said yes. I said no to Music and Silence, too, which read like the (very exquisitely wrought) lamentations of poor King Christian IV of Denmark.
What about Sunrise with Sea Monster? she asked. I've had Neil Jordan's book for a while but hadn't gotten around to reading it. Maybe it's time I did.
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