Books and reading have always been a big part of our babaà world. In this series we ask friends of babaà about their reading style, favourite books, and emotional connection to the written word.
For the seventh in our series we asked Oonagh Devitt Tremblay to share her love for books and reading with us. Oonagh is a writer based in London. She writes and reviews books and we connected online over an interview she did to a favourite author of ours. Admiration is always a great starting point. Thank you Oonagh.
You walk into a bookstore…what section do you go to first? How come?
I worked as a bookseller in an independent bookshop in London for a while and I love seeinghow other indies are set up. I typically look first at what is arranged on the tables dotted around a shop, these tend to be newer books, or a selection of books curated around a theme.
If I’m going into a shop without a specific book in mind, this is where I will look first. I also like when shops have bookseller recommendations, it’s fun to see how reading sensibilities can differ or coincide from shop to shop.
The last book that made you laugh?
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood. I reviewed this book for a London paper earlier this year. No one makes me laugh like Lockwood. Her books are profoundly moving, by turns absurd and then totally heartbreaking so when she gets you laughing, she really gets you.
Describe your ideal reading environment. Show us!
I wake up early on the days that I work so that I have an hour to read before I go to the office.I eat my breakfast (toast, tea) and then sit on the sofa and read while my cat Jane curls up on my lap. I like to say that my cat reads with me every morning, but really, she just sits on me while I struggle to turn pages; she gets very irritated when I try to underline a sentence or take a note. She’s been known bite the corner of a book and chew my pen as I try to use it.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
So much! I studied English in my undergrad and did a master’s in 18th Century British Literature, and for those years of my life I was basically only reading for homework, as it were. I didn’t have a reading practice that was for pleasure, it was totally oriented towards my academic work. I used to think I wanted to go straight into a PhD program but I’m so happy that I didn’t because it allowed me to develop a reading practice independent of my studies. It took me a few years to figure out what I liked to read. I didn’t really understand that there was a place between scholarly writing and pure commercial fiction, I thought if it wasn’t hard then it had to be easy. Then I started working in the bookshop and I learned a lot more about the publishing industry and landscape. The shop I worked for wasn’t particularly specialised and in the beginning, I just tried to get to grips with what sold well/shop favourites. As time went on, I began to read for myself and discover what I liked. In the beginning, this looked like finding one author I liked and then reading everything they had ever written. I still enjoy doing this (I’ve done it with: Patricia Lockwood, Miriam Toews Elizabeth Strout, Lorrie Moore, and now I’m working through Helen Garner). I’m autistic and I think my brain was used to understanding reading, and the world really, via the framework through which it was presented to me. So for a while, school was the framework, then the shop I worked at etc. It’s been one of the greatest pleasures of my life learning that I could create my own framework, that I could set the syllabus myself.
How do you organize your books?
In short, the tactic is: how many books can I possibly fit onto this shelf. I live in a tiny flat in London and have very limited space. I have one Billy bookcase and then a few other corners that I stuff as many books as I can into. I am part French and part Canadian so I have tried to keep my CanLit to one of the shelves and French literature to another. The books from my undergraduate degree live at my parent’s house in France. The books from my MPhil all burned, which was completely devastating at the time but now means I have fewer books to store in London. I was living in India (with my then boyfriend, now husband) and we had put all our stuff into storage so that we could travel with a project he was filming (he is a cinematographer). One day when we were relocating from Mumbai to a small city near Pune, we got an email that said the entire storage unit had burned. It was the most shoreless I have ever felt. My master’s was on a book called Clarissa, which is to this day one of the longest books ever written. I had a colour-coded highlighting system, a legend inside the partially disintegrated front cover, and hundreds of tabs in the pages. It is the most valuable thing I lost. Weeks later when we were back in Mumbai, I went to Kitab Khana, a well-known bookstore in the Fort district of Mumbai. It was like walking through a graveyard. I held a copy of Clarissa but left it. When I moved back to England at the start of 2020, I was staying with a friend in Oxford and I finally felt up to replacing my copy. I bought one at Blackwell’s; I’ve never re-read it, and barely opened it. But I will never not have a copy on my shelf. It takes up a big chunk of a Billy shelf. I shuffle books a lot, give some away, and store some on my desk at my office. One day I dream of more space, wherein I can fulfil my dreams or organising by author, genre, and – the ultimate dream, having an empty and ever- evolving shelf where I can put the books I’m using for a specific essay or project. I pulled a bunch of books for an essay the other day and now I just have two unwieldy stacks that I keep shuffling about the flat!
You have 12 uninterrupted hours to read right now, what do you reach for?
I still haven’t read Ulysses by James Joyce, and I really want to, so maybe that! I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in university and loved it but regretfully haven’t gottenaround to Ulysses. In September I was on a long flight back to Canada and I had planned to finish Middlemarch during that time and I ended up being sat next to two men who recounted their life stories to each other. It’s always the way, isn’t it? When you plan around uninterrupted stretches, life happens! But anyway, twelve uninterrupted hours to read Ulysses sounds wonderful. That or Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, which has been on my shelf for ages.
Is there a certain emotion you’re looking for when picking out what to read?
I want to be moved. My favourite kind of book is the kind that I have to put down for a minute in order to lie down and think, feel, sigh loudly etc. If a book achieves that I love it forever. I have often said that if I don’t need to lie down after reading a book I’m not interested. Miriam Toews’s books do that to me.
If you had to pick- do you prefer reading emotional or intellectual books?
My ideal book is a combination of both!
What are you going to read next?
I’m often managing reading for work and balancing deadlines, so it’s tricky sometimes figuring out what comes next. The books also pile up so quickly between projects! There’s a few books I would like to read before the end of the year, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (released in the UK this year by Daunt Books Publishing), Dog Days by Emily Labarge (published this year by Peninsula Press) and then Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul (Vintage) and Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (Vintage). The latter two aren’t new just high on my list and feel like books I need to read this year.
Show us a stack of books you have laying around!
