Writers Reading - MFW Curran

It's that time again, Writers Reading and our guest this week is Matt Curran author of The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer. I interviewed Matt almost exactly a year ago and it was a lot of fun.

This Writer’s Life in Book(shelves)

My life, it seems, has always been about books. One of my first childhood memories is of a floor-standing bookshelf at my parent’s home. Reaching as far the ceiling and over five feet across, it towered over me, housing hundreds of paperback books, their dazzling covers illustrated by some of the best artists of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s – and far superior to the more mundane efforts of mainstream publishers these days. The books called out to me. Hell, that bookshelf ‘sang’ to me, drawing me to the pages within.

When I was about ten years old, I stood on tip-toes and pulled the paperback of Frank Herbert’s Dune from the highest shelf I could reach. My love affair with the written word began then. While my peers were reading The Hobbit or Famous Five, I was reading – yet barely understanding – Herbert’s epic about sandworms and messiahs.

I never looked back.

My own bookshelves resemble those from childhood. Call it comfort, or perhaps an inherited desire to be disorganised in the display of literature (though perhaps not all story-telling; I have a very organised DVD collection) but disparate genres sit comfortably side by side as they did on my parents’ bookshelf. If there is any organisation at all to my bookshelves, it’s by author, or in the case of my fellow Macmillan New Writers, by imprint.

Or my own books.

I have books of inspiration; I have my favourites. I have a row of signed Clive Barker’s which I treasure. Weaveworld is perhaps the most treasured possession of all – a first edition signed way back in 1987 when Clive Barker was only just finding his feet and the recognition he so richly deserved. Then there are those books that struck the right note in that whole chorus of the written word; Gates of Fire, The Road, The Kraken Awakes and The Book Thief – may you all take a bow.

There are other books of note that also appear on the shelf occupied by China Mieville and short story anthologies, and these are the books I dip into again. The books that stir my imagination. Sometimes just seeing the spines of books reminds me of their contents, about a certain passage that never leaves me, or characters so colourful and vivid that I miss them.

Books do that. Good books stay with you, and having them on your bookshelf is like keeping a photograph to remind of you of those good times. For that reason, I never give books away.

On a last note for what is turning out to be a protracted explanation to my reading habits, I confess that I don’t find reading easy. Not because I’m a slow reader – no I can read fast enough, thank you. But my enemy is Time: a nearly full-time job, fatherhood and being a husband squeezes reading time to a half an hour a day. I would have more, but I also write, and if I’m honest, I prefer my own imagination to the imagination of others. There’s more freedom in there.

But that’s not to say I don’t like reading. I love it. When I get the opportunity to do so, I will devour or savour a good book, or even persevere with a bad one. That love affair with the written word remains and I’ve had many affairs with many writers over the years. There is nothing more inspiring to a writer, nothing that breeds that creative euphoria and motivates story-telling, than being crowded in by the imaginations of others, drowning in stories; and as the colours and textures drag me down into the wildest places of the imagination you might even catch me grinning carelessly…