WHAT BOOK would author Natalie Haynes take to a desert island?

WHAT BOOK would classicist and author Natalie Haynes take to a desert island?

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Natalie Haynes has said she’s currently reading Mick Herron’s Dead Lions

… are you reading now?

Mick Herron’s Dead Lions. I am incredibly late to these, so thank you to everyone who has resisted telling me spoilers. My friends were all devouring them on holiday last year but I was reading stuff for work, and it’s taken me nearly a year to get less behind on that and read for fun again.

Anyway, you’re probably way ahead of me, but they are fantastically paced, twisty, funny, clever, unpretentious and all round terrific spy novels. I want to work with everyone at Slough House, without ever having to go there myself.

I will also watch the TV adaptation, Slow Horses, because I can’t imagine Gary Oldman will be anything less than majestic as Jackson Lamb, but I have the worst memory for what’s on where and when. So if you see me on the new book tour, please remind me to watch it when I get home.

… would you take to a desert island?

I think I’d take the Iliad. I’ve been reading this extraordinary story of war and rage and what it means to be a man since I was studying A-level Greek, and I still find new things in every line when I come back to it. I read Greek a lot more slowly than I read English so it’d fill up the time better, too.

Also, my Homeric dictionary has a picture of a duck on the cover, which I imagine would cheer me up while I sat in my hammock hoping a boat would come along in a day or so.

… first gave you the reading bug?

The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

My nan worked in a bookshop when I was a child, and my mum had been an English teacher, so I was never short of books. It’s hard to imagine a better start for a writer than stacks of books you didn’t choose all around the house; you’ll always make new discoveries and broaden your tastes.

I think this is how I first read two series of books that shaped me as a person, let alone as a reader: The delightful Chronicles Of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander and the extraordinary The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper.

If you ever want to see me cry, ask me to tell you how Fflewddur Fflam keeps his friends alive on a mountainside in a storm.

And the moment when Will collects the first of the Six Signs from Farmer Dawson is and always will be one of the most important in my life. I’m interviewing Cooper this autumn at the British Library, and I really need to get my devoted fandom down to mildly unsettling enthusiasm by then.

… left you cold?

Finnegans Wake. I had to read it for an event at a book festival, and I understood literally nothing about it except the occasional bursts of smutty Latin, which I carefully underlined, so I’d have at least one thing to talk about when someone asked me what I thought of it.

In the end, I just answered the first question by confessing my total bafflement to the audience, then auctioned off my annotated copy for a literacy charity from the stage. Professional all day long, that’s me.

Divine Might: Goddesses In Greek Myth by Natalie Haynes is out now (Picador, £20).

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