The writer's bookshelf: Alexandra Wilson

Alexandra Wilson is an author, academic and freelance arts writer. Her books on opera include Puccini’s La bohème, Opera in the Jazz Age, and Someone Else’s Music. The forthcoming Culture Vultures: When Activism Meets the Arts, which will be published by Polity Press in October, broadens out into a consideration of the wider debates we are having about the arts today. It is available for pre-order now.

Alexandra writes regularly for publications including BBC Music Magazine, The Critic, and Engelsberg Ideas. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and you can read more about her work here.

What was your favourite book as a child?

I was a real bookworm. We used to visit the Central Library in York weekly and my mother was an assistant at a local branch library so I spent a lot of time there as well. I always had the maximum number of loans out on my card and I spent my pocket money on books too, back in the days when a paperback cost about 70p.

I read a lot of Victorian and Edwardian classics, such as the E. Nesbit novels, and a friend and I used to act out episodes from them, wearing white pinafore dresses her mother must have made. Another huge favourite was Three Men in a Boat: I remember laughing and laughing at the episode about the pineapple tin. I also had a particular enthusiasm for books set in theatrical contexts: Noel Streatfeild novels, obviously, but also Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain. Later, I loved Eva Ibbotson’s historical romances, some of which, such as Magic Flutes, also had a performing arts theme.

I was completely obsessed with the Asterix and Tintin books. Tintin had the more appealing artwork but I think I enjoyed the Asterix books more at the storytelling and humour level. I also remember some richly illustrated Usborne books called the Time Traveller series, about the Romans, Vikings, ancient Egyptians and knights and castles, which I would read and reread, poring over the illustrations.

What book has had the biggest influence on either your thinking or your writing?

In my books Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain and Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British, I have shown that opera was enjoyed by people from all social classes during the early to mid-twentieth century. I found a great deal of common ground between my research and Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which contains huge amounts of data on the working-class auto-didacticism movement. It’s a super book.

Generally speaking, I am always reading as a writer. Even when I wrote my doctoral thesis, I wanted to write in a way that was accessible to the general reader and to bring some of the pace of a novel to it. Storytelling has always driven my writing, and I am sure my style has been honed by voracious consumption of fiction, non-fiction and huge amounts of journalism. Whenever I read a book I am, consciously or subconsciously, looking for ways to learn about style, asking myself how an author organises material, or handles plot, or opens a book. Opening lines, incidentally, are crucial. If a first sentence doesn’t appeal to me, I won’t carry on reading.

Do you have a literary guilty pleasure?

I don’t really indulge in guilt when it comes to reading, but I suppose one genre I read that others might raise an eyebrow at is gossipy books about royalty, past and present. It all began when my husband bought me Tina Brown’s neon-pink-covered The Diana Chronicles as a birthday present, which seemed like a weird choice but turned out to be both well-written and a highly entertaining read. I’ll give royal biographies that are sycophantic and poorly written a pass though – it has to be something with a bit of bite. Andrew Lownie’s The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves was first-rate, though his recent book about the Yorks rather turned my stomach because of the subjects’ sheer awfulness.

Do you turn first to fiction or non-fiction for pleasure?

I tend to alternate, or have one of each on the go at the same time. I’ll go through phases when I am leaning more towards one genre or the other.

Non-fiction reading is usually historical. My recent reads have included Michael Robb’s Shelf Life, a history of bookselling, and Laura Cummings’s Thunderclap, which weaves the life of Golden-Age Dutch painters into a wider meditation on life and art.

I also enjoy biographies and autobiographies. Gyles Brandreth’s Odd Boy Out was hilarious and confirmed him as the best-connected man in the land. I often read memoirs about people you haven’t necessarily heard of. Ferdinand Mount’s Kiss Myself Goodbye, about his unusual, constantly metamorphosing aunt Munca, William Miller’s Gloucester Crescent, about growing up as the son of Jonathan Miller, and Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass, about the fate of her Jewish relatives in World War Two, were all excellent.

I’ve read a great deal of fiction over the course of my life but am very picky and struggle to find recent novels that appeal to me. I often find myself looking at the new novels tables in bookshops and feeling singularly uninspired. Perhaps it’s the covers – I’m not attracted to the current gaudy style of design – or perhaps it’s a feeling that a lot of current titles are aimed at readers who are younger and edgier than me.

I like a well-written story where I can really become engrossed in the lives of a group of people, perhaps a family. The mid-century middlebrow novels re-released by Persephone Books offer rich pickings in this regard (I have particularly enjoyed Dorothy Whipple’s books, and most of all Greenbanks, an excellent family saga). I enjoyed the first volume of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, and I absolutely adore Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

Among contemporary writers, I really admire the work of Clare Chambers, and would recommend readers look beyond her more heavily promoted recent titles to the lesser-known backlist: my favourite is Learning to Swim.

What writer or books do you most go back to?

I first read Brideshead Revisited in my early teens, having watched a rerun of the classic Granada series in what must have been around 1985 or 1986. I’ve read it many times since and it never fails in its emotional appeal. I find that I respond differently to it as time goes on. Obviously, as a young person, it was the idealism of the Oxford section that seemed particularly romantic, but on more recent readings I was more drawn to the ill-fated relationship between Julia and Charles. In quite different vein, I have read David Nicholls’s One Day many times: it definitely stands up to repeated reading.

On a daily basis the book I go back to most often is a reference book: The Viking Opera Guide, edited by Amanda Holden. It’s a fat tome, published in the early 1990s, with short essays by expert music historians on the most important operas by a huge array of composers. It’s by far the best music reference book I own, and barely a week goes by without me consulting it for my freelance commissions.

What writer or book have you most changed your mind about?

I suppose this issue has arisen most vividly when revisiting books that I loved as a child decades later with my son. It’s funny how books that you think of fondly as ‘favourites’ can seem almost unrecognisable when you encounter them again, the plot details having long since departed from your mind. I think I enjoyed Little Women well enough when I was a child, but reading it aloud proved quite a tedious experience for both reader and listener and I’m afraid to say that we gave up.

Generally speaking, however, my impression of a book, once formed, tends to remain fixed. As Mr Darcy said, ‘my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever’.

What was the last great book you read?

I really enjoyed Ian Leslie’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which has received a great deal of well-deserved praise. It’s a fascinating biography, but he also really gets into the technical complexity of what’s going on musically. That’s a very hard thing to pull off in a trade publication.

If by ‘great’ we’re talking about classics, I haven’t read as many as I should in adulthood and should probably try to do better. Pride and Prejudice never pales though, and reading it aloud to my son worked a lot better than Little Women!

What’s at the top of your to-be-read pile?

I recently heard Anne Sebba give a fascinating talk about her book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz and I am definitely going to get hold of a copy of that. I am also looking forward to Sue Roe’s Hidden Portraits, about six women who were romantically involved with Pablo Picasso. For work purposes, the next book on my to-read list is Opera, Italianità and Transatlantic Exchange by the young musicologist Ditlev Rindom.