My Perfect Book: A Snapshot
I’ve never thought as much about my reading
preferences as now, after becoming an author and having started to answer
questions about what I like to read and why, and how it has influenced my
writing. And as thoroughly as I might try to reply to that question, I still
can’t help feeling that the whole idea of reading preferences is a misnomer,
because you’re always leaving something out, and forgetting books you love, and
creating hierarchies you’ll regret later on.
Yet even if I can’t accurately tell you what my
favourite books are, I definitely know what they look like. I just have to close my eyes, and they’re there, in my
mind’s eyes, my absolutely perfect books.
Maybe that’s only understandable, because I live in
Italy, the land of beauty, Il Bel Paese, where few things are more important than
cutting a bella figura and
appearances often count more than contents. So it matters here how books look,
just the way it matters how bags and shoes look.
What’s more, my novel Witchcraft
Couture tells a story of a fashion designer, Oscar Pellegrini, who is
besotted with beauty and determined to design the most beautiful outfits that
have ever existed in the history of mankind. With the help of magic he
succeeds, and becomes one of the big names of Italian fashion.
Somehow I have the feeling that if Oscar were ever to read a
book, it would have to be an outstandingly beautiful book. It could be, for
example, an old leather-bound book, its pages thick and yellowed, and typewriter font quaintly old-fashioned.
Usually it smells of mould and dust, of bygone decades, and you can just feel
it, the fact that dozens of readers have touched and loved those very same
pages before you. Occasionally there is a name and a year – say, Susan Fennings, 1937 – and you can’t help
wondering who Susan was, and where life took her afterwards.
Or the
perfect book can be a heavy hardback, untouched and pristine, and reading it is
a pleasure because you know that you’re the first person to turn those pages. Also
this type of book has an odour: it’s that antiseptic scent of freshly printed
paper, that wonderful whiff of cleanliness and virginity. Often I feel almost
intimidated to read a book so immaculate, because in my hands it will be all
crumpled and stained in no time at all.
And that
is why I’ve learned to love my Kindle – or why now, thinking of my favourite
books, I no longer imagine print books, but my dark and sleek e-reader,
containing an entire library of stories. We have come a long way together, my
Kindle and I, so much so that at times I wonder whether it has almost acquired
a sort of personality, and whether it, too, has reading preferences of its own.
So take it
from me. Perfect books have many faces. Just like perfect stories.
Katarina West was
born in Helsinki, Finland, into a bilingual family that in addition to humans
consisted of dogs, cats, horses, guinea pigs, canaries, rabbits and – thanks to
her biology teacher mother – stuffed owls and squirrels.
She spent time travelling in Africa, Asia and Latin
America, and went on to study at Queen Mary and Westfield College in London and
the European University Institute in Florence, where she completed a PhD in
political science and published a book based on it, Agents of Altruism. During
those student years she started work as a journalist, and continued writing for
various Finnish magazines and newspapers for over ten years, writing on various
topics from current events and humanitarian issues to celebrity interviews and
short stories. She also briefly worked as a university lecturer on humanitarian
issues in Northern Italy.
Katarina lives in an old farmhouse in Chianti with her
husband and son and when not writing, she is fully immersed in Tuscan country
life, from jam-making and olive-picking to tractor maintenance.
