WHAT BOOK would author Sue Monk Kidd, take to a desert island?
- Sue Monk Kidd reveals the first book she remembers was Alice in Wonderland
- The American author fell in love with England when she read Jane Eyre aged 13
- If trapped on a desert island she’d read The Shark Club, a novel set on an island
. . . are you reading now?
Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. Her journey from modest beginnings on the South Side of Chicago to the renown of the White House makes for an enthralling tale.
As I read about her grief, resilience, private struggles, public daring, lows and highs, I saw how the choices we make in life shape us.
The book inspires me to consider the enduring questions: Who am I? Who am I becoming?
Author Sue Monk Kidd (pictured) revealed she would take her daughter Ann Kid Taylor’s book The Shark Club with her to a desert island
. . . would you take to a desert island?
The Shark Club, an intoxicatingly beautiful novel that’s set on an island.
Weaving together an environmental mystery, a love story, and a quintessential quest for self-autonomy, healing and fulfilment, the book is about a brilliant young scientist and her mysterious kinship with the sea and the sharks that inhabit it.
It’s written by my daughter Ann Kidd Taylor: I chose it in part because I imagine it will be a comfort to have her voice and presence resonating from within the pages while I’m in exile, but honestly, the larger reason is that it’s one of those rare novels I could read over and over.
. . .first gave you the reading bug?
I remember exactly where I was when I read Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, a detail I can’t recall about any other book I read as a child.
I was ten, stretched out on a blanket in the garden beneath a mimosa tree covered in pink blossoms that kept falling onto my pages.
I lay there all day and read. My mother brought me a sandwich so I wouldn’t starve.
The wild, dazzling world I experienced down the rabbit hole pushed back the boundaries of my imagination.
I always go back to that experience as the day I became not just a person who reads, but a reader.
She says she can remember exactly where she was when she first read Alice In Wonderland
Then, at 13, I read Jane Eyre. As an American girl, living in a small town in the Deep South, I came to love England by reading Jane’s story.
Obviously, it was a place where spirited, penniless, mistreated orphan girls could sweep rich, brooding, melancholy men off their feet, while saying things like: ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.’
It caused me to fall in love not just with England, but with stories. If Alice turned me into a reader, Jane helped turn me into a writer.
. . . left you cold?
Moby Dick. I say this with apologies to the author, Herman Melville. I know there are people who love this classic, but I failed at even liking it.
It features a man who obsessively pursues a white sperm whale in order to kill it. The hunt goes on for 135 chapters to an ending of epic tragedy. Enough said.
The Book Of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd is published by Tinder Press, £20.