My Favourite Book: AN INTERVIEW with Eloise Porter

Ellie and I met in the first year of university. It did not take me long to learn that she is a voracious reader. Not only does she read enviably quickly – she finished several Song of Fire and Ice books in the time I read one – but she also reads from a vast number of genres, though her favourite is epic fantasy, especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. Ellie has been known to keep somewhat quiet about her reading habits. I think I only discovered her love of literature by way of obnoxiously chatting about my own. Besides books, Ellie loves languages – she is proficient in Spanish, French and Russian – cricket, bourbon biscuits and Jason Derulo. She currently resides in Japan, working as an English teacher. We discussed Tolkien, reading in translation and Orwell, as well as spouting some nonsense about fish and lightning.

DANIELA: What is your favourite book?

ELOISE: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

D: Why do you like it?

E: I like it because it is, and this is going to sound weird to anyone who isn’t a fan of Tolkien, but it’s more like a history book than a fantasy book. It’s got twenty languages in it and it’s almost impossible to remember all the characters and all the places and it’s like a labyrinth…of magic.

D: You like it for the reason that it’s almost impossible to remember all the names of all the characters?

E: Yes, and you have to keep going back to the pages in the back and looking at the family trees and even though it doesn’t sound like a fun time, it’s a fun time.

D: I recommend Vanity Fair to you. There are over three hundred named characters.

E: Are there orcs and elves?

D: No, none, none of the above. Just Victorian people.

E: Then no, thank you.

D: What do you get from reading that you don’t get from watching a movie? Why do you read even though there are so many other, perhaps easier, ways of spending your free time?

E: Obviously it wasn’t the first reason I ever read, but definitely now, between reading and watching films, I certainly hate my life and hate myself less when I read. There’s definitely part of me that feels like I’m enriching myself rather than rotting my own brain.

D: Yeah, that’s funny, isn’t it? I never thought about it that way. You do hate yourself less if you spend six hours reading than if you spend six hours watching TV.

E: Exactly. If you read for seven hours it wouldn’t feel like you’d wasted your day, whereas, if you sit in front of Netflix for seven hours, you definitely do.

D: Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s just because reading is harder?

E: I guess you have to concentrate more and, generally, if I’m on the internet, I’m doing more than one thing but if I’m reading I can only focus on one thing.

D: Yeah, you can’t do anything else. Do you mostly just read novels or do you read non-fiction or poetry or anything else?

E: I read a bit of everything. I go through phases. So, sometimes I’ll remember how much I love poetry and I’ll read poetry. I would say I read more fiction than non-fiction but what happens when I kind of forget how much I love reading or go through a lull in reading, I read a fantasy book again and I get back into it.

D: Who are some of your favourite poets?

E: I think my favourite poet is Baudelaire.

D: Ohhh, he’s French, right? [This is a joke.]

E: Yeah, and I like reading him in French even though it’s kind of a struggle sometimes. I haven’t read any recently but, in school, my favourite poet was [Thomas] Hardy.

D: Like Milla [our friend Camilla Bryden]!

E: Yeah, we were in the same English class, huh. I definitely like reading poetry in the original language.

D: I was just going to ask that. Do you read anything else besides poetry in Spanish or French? Or Russian? Or Japanese?

E: I try. I haven’t yet found any Spanish literature that I’ve fallen in love with but I definitely feel a sense of guilt if I don’t read it in the original language. I feel like I’m cheating. So, I always do try if I’m reading an author whose language I speak in the original.

D: Do you think things get lost in translation?

E: Yeah, I think so. Definitely with poetry. It’s almost impossible to translate poetry. So much of it is about how certain words sound together and the rhythm. Sometimes, I do find the translation is beautiful still, but it’s definitely not the same. I think with novels, it’s more or less captured.

D: Jeremy and I have talked about translation and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. There are obvious drawbacks to it but if it didn’t exist then you couldn’t ever read the book at all and you have to be so good at a language to read a novel in the original language, so a massive percentage of people could just never read it. It’s hard to say what’s better.

E: Definitely in my field as well, there have been a lot of writers and lovers of literature who get angry and upset when things have been lost. Especially in philosophical writing and stuff like that where translation hasn’t gone down that well. I wouldn’t like to have the pressure of translating.

D: No, it’s just going to make everybody mad. Well, not everybody but definitely some people. Did you read the same kinds of books in high school that you read now or do you feel your tastes have evolved?

E: In some senses. I’m still very much a fifteen year old in my taste in fantasy books and what I find to be easy reading but I’ve definitely become a lot more cynical as I’ve aged. Now I definitely like things a bit more political. And I think that’s a trend that’s probably going to continue.

D: What’s an example of something political that you’ve read recently that you liked?

E: I’m definitely a big Orwell fan now.

D: Really?

E: Mmhmm, and books along those lines. And books that are critical of war like Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22. When I’m not taking my time off to read fantasy books, that’s what I like to go back to. Actually, my favourite thing I’ve read by Orwell is this tiny little book, I can’t remember its name, but it was a tiny little, I don’t know, essay on what he thought it was to be British and until I read it I never really thought Britain had culture or, like a national feeling that held us all together, but he just said it was things like, even dull things like always complaining about the weather and having a bit of a stiff upper lip and that was the first time I think I realised that we actually had a way of being.

D: That’s interesting. Have you seen the whole Penguin Eightieth anniversary thing?

E: No!

D: Oh, well, it’s the eightieth anniversary of Penguin this year and to celebrate it they’ve put out eighty tiny little books that are either a chapter from a book or a little known piece of writing from a famous writer or a bit of an ancient text. And they’re all 80p.

E: Oh, Penguin, nice work! Little known books that you find in those collections that people or publishers release, I always find that those are somehow more beautiful than the best known works.

D: Yeah, or just interesting in different ways.

E: What I will always remember, or at least up until this point in my life, as the most beautiful thing I ever read was a short story by Vladimir Nbokov called “Terra Incognita.” He wrote it in English even though his first language is Russian and it is ten times more beautiful than anything I could ever write.

D: That’s annoying of him.

E: Yeah. Right? Very annoying. I really want to find my copy again and save it because it was seriously so beautiful. And it was only like five pages but I read it like fifty times.

D: That’s cool. I’ll have to look it up. I’m just curious, and this is a very specific question to you, but when was the first time you read Lord of the Rings? Or did you read The Hobbit first?

E: Good question. I think I read Lord of the Rings first. And I read it when I was like thirteen, maybe. And I’d watched the films before but I thought the films were so boring the first time I watched them. And I fell asleep and made a big point about it.

D: That’s so funny.

E: I know, considering how obsessed with them I am now. Then we had periods in school where English class would be you just take your book in and you read.

D: I frickin’ loved that. We had that in school too.

E: Yeah. I wish that was a thing in university. And I remember I was on the end of book two with the bit [some names and something about a spirit attack that I didn’t understand].

D: Mmhmm. [I say as if I know exactly what she’s talking about]

E: And the teacher was like, right, we’re gonna have ten minutes where we talk about our books and the whole class put their books down and I was like, no! I cannot do this! And I refused to stop reading and I just kept reading…and that was probably the most rebellious moment of my youth.

D: Did you know the first time you read it? Were you like, woah, this book has changed my life?

E: I think it was when I read The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales that I really got, I think obsessed is a fair word.

D: I think it’s a fair word too.

E: I mean, I definitely struggled through The Silmarillion the first time I read it. It definitely wasn’t easy going. But it changed things.

D: Did you like the last Hobbit movie?

E: No.

D: I saw it in the cinema. I didn’t think you would like it.

E: They were all rubbish. I didn’t like any of them.

D: There was a lot of battle in the last one.

E: It was just one big battle.

D: You could tell there weren’t that many pages going into that three-hour movie, or whatever it was. I think I fell asleep.

E: My main qualm, apart from it obviously being ridiculous that it was made into three movies, films, is that Lord of the Rings somehow felt really real. Like it took ten hours for them to do one orc’s makeup and it was all like real stuff whereas the Hobbit was just too much CGI and you couldn’t believe it.

D: I know what you mean.

E: But I also kind of love to hate The Hobbit. So I was glad that I hated it.

D: What are the next three books you really want to read that you haven’t read yet? Or two or one or if there’s any that are just staring you in the face?

E: Let me find my Kindle because I surely bought one and they’re waiting for me to read.  I would like to say for the record…

D: Go on.

E: That I was initially opposed to the Kindle because I like the feeling of a book but this thing is magic.

D: Yeah, I like reading on my iPad as well. I thought I would hate it and I thought I would feel like a traitor but there’s certain books that I don’t feel like I need to buy. If it’s a six hundred page series paperback it might as well be on my Kindle.

E: Exactly. So, the next three books are, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, A History of the United States by Howard Zinn and…um…where’s it gone…A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.

D: Cool. That was my last question. Any other final words or final statements for the record?

E: Final words. I sometimes wonder when lighting hits the ocean why don’t all the fish die…you know?

D: Yeah, I do know. That’s a great stopping point for the interview.

E: Actually, final words. Sometimes, I don’t hate myself, but I feel silly that the book that changed my life the most is one about elves because one’s that have affected me in a political and how I view the world way are ones like 1984 and Catch 22 but The Silmarillion and Tolkien is different. And I chose it because I have never been as excited about a book or a concept or a world as I was about that one.

FIN.