Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines, is in the hot seat this week. He tells us that no woman is truly attractive unless you can imagine going to the pub with her, and admits to a fear that he may be one of Holden Caulfield’s ‘phonies’.
1) What are you reading at the moment?
Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi. Yes, that
Bob Woodward. Strange choice of subject for the man who brought down Nixon (as Woodward himself admits) – but it’s a great read.
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?
Agatha Christie. Once boasted to my mother that I’d been awake until 4am finishing Dead Man’s Folly. She was less impressed with this feat than I was.
3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?
Bizarrely I never seem to cry at books, even ones that move me. I say ‘bizarrely’ because I regularly blub at films. Worrying, that – as Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye: ‘You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.’
4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
Two I’ve always wanted to get round to and never have – The Origin of Species and Middlemarch – plus, as a banker, Alan Clark’s diaries.
5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?
Nicola Six in London Fields. Trouble, but then that’s the attraction.
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?
For years I wanted to write a diet book called ‘How To Lose Weight – Guaranteed’. Every left-hand page would have said ‘eat less’, every right-hand page ‘exercise more’. Then I realised it would never sell: the people who buy diet books know this fundamental truth already – they’re buying the ones about complicated and faddish diets to escape the truth.
7) Michael Gove has asked you to rewrite the GCSE English Literature syllabus. Which book, which play, and which poem would you make compulsory reading?
Certainly none that I think children should read – making something compulsory, especially at that age, kills off any chance you might have had of them enjoying it. The older I get the more I think education is … well, not wasted on the young – but I do like the idea of doing your living until middle-age, then embarking on the education to make sense of it.
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?
Has to be one of Jay Gatsby’s, doesn’t it?
9) What would you title your memoirs?
‘Does Anyone Know If I Put Sugar in That Tea?’
10) Which literary character do you dream of playing?
Rip Van Winkle. (I have a two year-old child.)
11) What book would you give to a lover?
The Good Pub Guide. No woman is truly attractive unless you can imagine going to the pub with her.
12) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell havoc for a friendship. What’s your literary dealbreaker?
Anything by Jamie Oliver. As a jumped-up mockney chef he was just annoying; now he’s appointed himself Moral Saviour of the Nation he needs taking down.
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