Which 3 books leave Reeta Chakrabarti cold?

What Book …

Journalist and broadcaster, Reeta Chakrabarti

… are you reading now?

I HAVE just finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which is one of the most extraordinary novels I’ve ever read.

It was published in the mid-1990s, but is now being rediscovered – my daughter and her friend read it, and passed it on to me.

Thirty-nine women and one female child live in a cage for as long as the child can remember, kept imprisoned by male guards. 

One day there is a sudden commotion and the men flee, leaving the cage open. What ensues is devastating and impenetrable. I hope someone explains it to me one day.

…would you take to a desert island?

Impossible to imagine having only one book, but given that I would at last have the luxury of many hours with nothing to do, let me cheat and take a series.

Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time is a 12-parter – I got halfway through it some years back. When I was much younger and more energetic I also got halfway through Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time. I can see a theme emerging here, to do with time and halfway through.

A ‘proper’ book: Jane Eyre gripped Reeta

…first gave you the reading bug?

Like all children of my vintage, I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Louisa May Alcott.

But the first ‘proper’ book was Jane Eyre, which fell into my hands when I was eight, probably because Bronte was next to Blyton in the library. 

I don’t know what I made of the romance or of the mad woman in the attic, but I was gripped by the cruelty meted out to young Jane by her cold-hearted aunt, and the deprivations she suffers at Lowood school. I have been a reader ever since.

… left you cold?

I HAVE never got beyond the first page of Moby Dick. I am assured that a treat awaits me if I persevere, so one day perhaps I will.

I struggle with Virginia Woolf and feel guilty, as she’s the sort of author I ought to like in principle. I am a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro but had to plod my way through The Buried Giant. 

And while I read Ulysses once for my literature degree, I am very unlikely ever to pick it up again. (I hope my husband doesn’t see this, he loves it…)