{"id":166128,"date":"2025-08-22T09:25:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/166128\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T09:25:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T09:25:13","slug":"james-rebanks-i-was-a-closet-reader-for-years-james-rebanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/166128\/","title":{"rendered":"James Rebanks: \u2018I was a closet reader for years\u2019 | James Rebanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

My earliest reading memory<\/strong>
Sitting on the floor while our primary teacher, Mrs\u00a0Craig, read to us about Odysseus and the blinded Cyclops. The story transported me to a hillside on an island in ancient Greece. I think that moment put the idea in my head that books, the best ones, were a kind of magic.<\/p>\n

My favourite book growing up<\/strong>
In my teens I stopped reading, like lots of boys. My mum was the only bookish person in our family, almost everyone else was obsessed with our farm. My grandma scolded me one day for reading in daylight hours; she said there couldn\u2019t possibly be so little to do on the farm that a boy should sit and read a book. She swept me out of her kitchen to find some work to do. And I felt ashamed that she thought I was idle.<\/p>\n

The book that changed me as a teenager<\/strong>
When I was 15, I left school and worked on our farm, and I began reading again. I read at night, because I couldn\u2019t yet drive and there was nothing on TV. I was lucky that my mum had a bookcase of great books, left to her by her schoolteacher dad. I felt a bit of an alien in my own life at that time, as many young people do, and I found my best friends in those books. I was spending my evenings with Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, JD\u00a0Salinger or Wilfred Owen (yes, it was quite a male sample, and I should have read my grandad\u2019s copies of Iris Murdoch, but didn\u2019t). I didn\u2019t dare tell anyone about this reading, so I was a closet reader for years. But thanks to those books, I\u00a0didn\u2019t feel so alone.<\/p>\n

The writer who changed my mind<\/strong>
I recently read Poverty, By America<\/a> by Matthew Desmond. It helped me understand how our economic system works, why it stays like that, and how many of us benefit from the existence of other people\u2019s poverty.<\/p>\n

The book that made me\u00a0want to be a writer<\/strong>
A Shepherd\u2019s Life by WH\u00a0Hudson. It was a revelation because it was about people like my family. It\u2019s a portrait of rural life and farming people in the mid-19th century in Wiltshire, as remembered by an old shepherd who reminded me of my grandfather. Reading it, I felt my world could legitimately be the stuff of books, and that\u2019s powerful when you are 16. It took me 20 years to get from that teenage burst of self-belief and purpose to having a book published, but it did happen. It was an international bestseller called The Shepherd\u2019s Life.<\/p>\n

The <\/strong>author I\u00a0came back\u00a0to<\/strong>
One of my favourite books is Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard. But I\u00a0find his other novels and short stories hard work. I keep trying to read them, because loads of talented writers admire and praise them, but it\u2019s a bit of a slog.<\/p>\n

The book I reread<\/strong>
If I had to live with just one book I might take the translated poems of Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet. She\u2019s such an elegant and classy writer, dealing with some of the most horrific moments of the 20th\u00a0century. There is a\u00a0poem she wrote called Requiem, about those troubled times, that I\u00a0think might be the best thing I\u2019ve ever read.<\/p>\n

The book I could never read again<\/strong>
I read a lot of Holocaust and gulag memoirs in my 20s. I think I wanted to understand what people could do to each other and what people could endure. And now I\u00a0can\u2019t read books like that \u2013 I have four kids and it\u2019s all too real and heartbreaking.<\/p>\n

The book I discovered later in life<\/strong>
I didn\u2019t read any Wendell Berry until after I wrote my first book, which is really odd, because he is the greatest agrarian radical writer of our age. I love his essays (The World-Ending Fire) best, they are really clear-eyed and elegant, and grounded in his memories of rural Kentucky.<\/p>\n

The book I am currently reading<\/strong>
Out Stealing Horses by\u00a0Per Petterson. A wonderful book that I\u2019m reading for the third time. I am obsessed with Scandi literature. I feel like my\u00a0cultural roots are to the north. I love The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, the poetry of Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer and the novels of Halld\u00f3r Laxness: their obsession with kinship and deep-rooted belonging, and the kind of people that emerge from hardship in the north.<\/p>\n

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My comfort read<\/strong>
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. It\u00a0is\u00a0a wholesome fable about how an old French shepherd changes his landscape by planting oak trees, for many years, until he has seeded a forest. You can\u00a0read it in about 10\u00a0minutes and yet it is\u00a0jam-packed with wisdom.<\/p>\n

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks is out in paperback from Penguin. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My earliest reading memorySitting on the floor while our primary teacher, Mrs\u00a0Craig, read to us about Odysseus and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":166129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-166128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115071701707456278","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}