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Three Taylor Prize finalists share their reading habits

On Monday, March 7, the winner of this year’s $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize will be announced. Named for author and reporter Charles Taylor, the prize is awarded to the author whose book from the past year best exemplifies “a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception.”

Q&Q asked some of this year’s Taylor nominees for insight into their reading habits.

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ROSEMARY SULLIVAN
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins)

What are you reading right now? 
Joan Crate’s Black Apple.

 If there was one book you wish you’d written, what would it be?
John Vaillant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.

What’s the best book you’ve read this year so far? 
Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy.

What’s the last book you read that really inspired a strong emotional response?
Eva Stachniak’s Empress of the Night.

Do you have a favourite book-to-film adaptation?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

If you could only take one book with you to a desert island, what would it be? 
How to Survive on a Desert Island.

Do you read mostly non-fiction, or what genre are you most drawn to? 
I read equal amounts of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Digital or print? 
Print.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing your nominated title? 
Interviewing members of Joseph Stalin’s immediate family, including his grandson and granddaughter.

What are you working on now?
A memoir about Chile.

 

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IAN BROWN
Sixty: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning? (Random House Canada)

What are you reading right now?
I am reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Fredrik Sjöberg’s The Fly Trap, and, intermittently, Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, and Changing My Mind, a book of essays by Zadie Smith.

If there was one book you wish you’d written, what would it be?
Jesus, what a question.  I wish I had written just about every great book I read. But I really would like to have written “Big Two-Hearted River,” one of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories.

What’s the best book you’ve read this year so far?
Another impossible question.  Apart from Moby-Dick?  Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, a graphic novel, was ultra-compelling. But so were five others.

What’s the last book you read that really inspired a strong emotional response?
Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk knocked me over. So did the poetry of Philip Larkin and Tony Hoagland and Sharon Olds, all of which I read and still reread. So did Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, though for different reasons. I have long admired Solnit’s writing and thinking, but parts of that book felt like a rhetorical trick. I’m still not sure why.

Do you have a favourite book-to-film adaptation?
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Sterne’s famous novel, starring Steve Coogan, hands down. I laughed as much as I laughed the first time I saw Animal House.

If you could only take one book with you to a desert island, what would it be?
What are you, some kind of sadist? War and Peace? The Bible? The OED? I would consider all those. But in the end I think I would take the collected works of Shakespeare.

Do you read mostly non-fiction, or what genre are you most drawn to?
No, my tastes are catholic to the point of being evidence of ADD. Poetry, essays, great non-fiction (anything by Ian Frazier or Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion or a dozen others), fiction, graphic novels, certain instructional manuals, I love them all.

Digital or print?
I read digitally when I travel.  But I much prefer print. It’s less tiring, for starters.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing your nominated title?
Convincing myself that the details of a middle-class 60-year-old’s daily life were worth writing about, that there was enough at stake. They were, and there was, but you always struggle to believe that what you’re doing means something, don’t you think?

What are you working on now?
In addition to my job at the Globe? A play, and a book about my mother. Speaking of challenges.

 

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CAMILLA GIBB
This Is Happy (Doubleday Canada)

What are you reading right now?
The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks.

If there was one book you wish you’d written, what would it be?
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

What’s the best book you’ve read this year so far?
A poem. Not one published this year. “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson.

What’s the last book you read that really inspired a strong emotional response?
Again – the poem above.

Do you have a favourite book-to-film adaptation?
Sarah Polley’s Away From Her.

If you could only take one book with you to a desert island, what would it be?
Kafka on the Shore. Murakami is my best company.

Do you read mostly non-fiction, or what genre are you most drawn to?
For the past six years non-fiction. I keep waiting for the desire to read fiction to return.

Digital or print?
Print.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing your nominated title?
Believing it mattered.

What are you working on now?
Marking students papers.‎ A lot of them.