KEY POINTS:
Emily Perkins is the author of the recently released Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury) and has presented TV One's The Book Show.
The book I love most is...
hard to pin down, but I keep coming back to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which has everything - love, sex, politics, heartbreaking tragedy and exquisite writing. It treats literature as part of real life and is one of those brilliant books that changes each time you read it.
The book I'm reading now is...
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, a wrist-breaker of a novel that I've just lugged to England and back without making much progress through. This isn't the book's fault - it's a vast, weird, exciting portrayal of the Vietnam War - but it requires you to work hard to locate yourself in the characters and action. Can't quite manage it late at night (my only reading time available) but it's so good I don't want to start anything else before I've finished it, either.
The book I'd like to read next is...
Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. I've got a feeling it might help with the novel I'm working on and writing is very much about following mysteries and hunches. And I have James Wood's How Fiction Works by my bedside as though I might absorb its wisdom by osmosis in my sleep. At the rate I'm going with Tree of Smoke, I'll be ready to actually read it in 2010.
- Detours, HoS
