Writer & academic
Craig Lamont







Friday 28th August 2020



Q1) The first book you ever loved

This is going to be a wandering (or disappointing) answer but maybe that’s alright.

My mum has always read romance novels and my dad never had the patience to stick with any genre. I remember him leaning against a tree with a crime book the first time we were in Spain. He looked bored. When I was about 7 or 8 he took me to Waterstone’s and I picked some random books. It was the only time he did this.

For some reason I went with Stephen Fry’s The Liar and Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde. In all honesty I didn’t ‘love’ either; I just liked the covers, but Hyde’s book did teach me a lot about morality, and I think those lessons were crucial.

The first book I reread without having to was The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. I remember being properly engrossed for the first time. Something about it felt special, like everything joined up in a way I’d never thought of before. I haven’t read it in a long time but I did love it back then.

Q2) The book you’ve read more than any other

Dubliners by Joyce. As a short story writer I’m always rereading collections to see if I’ve missed any magic in the way stories are interwoven. Sometimes I find myself bored of certain stories, like ‘After the Race’, when the lifestyle Joyce portrays seems more dated and dull than I remembered.

But for the most part there are images he conjures up from everyday life that have stuck with me ever since. Since becoming a dad I reread ‘A Little Cloud’ just to exorcise from my memory the scene when Little Chandler is trying to stop the baby crying:

“The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted…”

The first Joyce story I read was ‘Clay’. It seems so ordinary, and even though the characters all feel like they’re trapped in the past I somehow related to it completely. But most of all I read Dubliners now and again just to earn the finale. (See my answer to question 7).

Q3) A book that you despise

A strong word, that. And I’ll happily assign it to Every Single Celebrity (Auto)Biography that stops good writers getting shelf space. I mean, sure – there’s probably good ones out there, and maybe I’m just jealous, but I can’t hack the extra self-indulgence of people who’ve already made a career out of their own image. (Joe Wicks I’m looking at you, mate).

Q4) A book full of beautiful writing

Gerry McGrath’s book of poetry A to B is beautiful to me because it is often so ordinary. It appeals to my obsession with memory (personal, collective, you name it) and it was a real inspiration to me when I began taking writing more seriously. ‘First Love’ is short enough for me to quote in its entirety, just for the joy of typing it out:

“Sunlight swarms around the head
of the boy who sits playing piano
on the kitchen table.

The back door moves slow as a glacier.
Through the indifferent windows
grass gathers each note that travels
soundlessly from his fingertips.”

There are some prose poems, too, just as beautiful. It’s the little descriptions that get me: the timeless, normal descriptions that give the reader pause. Looking at the book now I’m seeing all sorts of these underlined, like the one about a dying father (‘Only Life’), moving from lint and stars to the quiet, dying voice and the slow draw of a cigarette.

Q5) The book you’ve been meaning to read for years, but haven’t

And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson. It’s one of those must-reads for so many working in Scottish Literature. It’s a sprawling epic and, apparently, it looks at the self-sabotaging nature of the Scottish Soul. I find this highly interesting, but I’ve never opened it. It’s there, on my shelf, waiting. Part of me doesn’t want to be disappointed. I loved his book The Testament of Gideon Mack, so I know he’s a great writer and storyteller. This, I think, is more about Scotland the nation, and because people keep telling me to read it I’ve found myself resisting it.

Q6) The book you’re reading currently

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. The subtitle (A Contrivance of Horror) is a nod towards the author’s preferred genre: horror fiction. But this isn’t fiction. It’s a book of philosophical essays about the pointlessness of life and the preconditions we’re all trapped by. Despite what I’m about to say, this book helps me get to sleep sometimes.

I was recommended it by rapper Sadistik, whose fascinating career I’ve been following for years. The main reason I’m still reading it, months after it arrived, is because I’m a (relatively new) father, and so much of the book considers anti-natalism. I couldn’t be further from this point of view, and I find it hard-going because of this, but the way Ligotti weighs up all the points of view (especially Peter Wessel Zapffe’s) is compelling and somehow gentle.

So far, becoming a dad has been the most reinvigorating spiritual journey I’ve experienced. Before Rhona (13 and a bit months old) was born I used to get middle-of-the-night existential dread. The kind of dread that’s waiting on you when you wake up. It penetrates every happy distraction you’ve known. This book helps me test how I feel about those mortal shivers, and 9 out of 10 times I find the counter-argument helpful. A quick aside: if you liked the first series of True Detective (HBO), this book is for you. (A quicker aside: I still get these shivers, but not nearly as often).

Q7) Your favourite short story

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce is my favourite short story. The first time I read it was in 2nd year at Uni. It was winter, and I’d come home to an empty house. I had to read it for a class, and rather than a copy of Dubliners it was in this big course textbook. I sat on the floor for some reason, reading by the window. It was light when I began, and I was wondering what was so important about this party the Morkan sisters were throwing. I quite liked the way Joyce sketched the different characters coming in out the cold, and the way some of them got drunk over the course of the night.

By the time I reached those final, exceptional scenes the room was almost dark. There was just enough light to see the pages, and this made it all the more special. I leaned in when I read this part, certain that something magic was about to happen:

“A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. [Gabriel] could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife.”

Until that moment Gabriel had loomed over his wife, and over everybody, in the story. The ‘Distant Music’ scene has been quoted and studied over time and again by Modernists. And for good reason. The way it crescendos, leaving all the meaningless stresses of work and sociability as it floats into that “grey impalpable world” has always moved me. “One by one, they were all becoming shades.”

That the last two words of the story are ‘the dead’ has always impressed me, too.

Q8) Your all-time favourite novel

I’m resisting every urge to sound more sophisticated here, but I have to go with my instinct. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It’s not the best novel ever written and it’s not the most important – not even close. But when I picked this up for the first time I genuinely fell back in love with reading. The melodrama, the decadence, the audacity of the character building. There’s an unreasonableness to this book that ties all the action together, and maybe that’s why I love it. There’s a boldness in writing that just gets you. It’s not shock value, it’s the promotion of the human condition with as much drama as possible. It’s also a punchline in The Shawshank Redemption and in the 2002 film adaptation Jim Caviezel’s ‘reveal’ makes me laugh every time (when it shouldn’t). Really though, it’s an escape – from the overthinking and the critical gaze – and sometimes that’s all a novel has to be. ●







Craig Lamont is an academic and writer from Glasgow. At the Centre for Robert Burns Studies (University of Glasgow) Craig is working on new scholarly editions of Robert Burns (Oxford) and Allan Ramsay (Edinburgh). Craig’s short stories have appeared in journals since 2009. His main focus is ‘memory’. // t: @craigscrolls






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