What I’m reading in lockdown: Rhod Gilbert, Hugo Vickers and more
Rhod Gilbert
I am not reading at the moment. I normally have a book on the go, but I seem to be consumed with the news cycle and cannot drag myself away from it. I find it hard to concentrate normally, but right now I can’t get halfway through an apple without getting distracted by Covid-19 talk.
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Natalya Romaniw
Christmas at the Beach Café by Lucy Diamond. It’s part of a series and not very challenging, I admit – in fact, it’s pure pink-fluffy escapism and it gives me nice bedtime thoughts about being at the seaside.
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Mark Elder
I like to read more than one thing at once. I’m discovering Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a portrayal of the relationship between the white and black populations in Jamaica. I love her style. It’s not at all flowery, it just burns to the heart of things like acid. I love thrillers – I just finished David Baldacci’s Endgame, and am now onto something totally different, Ned Palmer’s A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles. And two musical books: Stephen Walsh’s book on Debussy and Jan Swafford’s biography of Beethoven, both wonderful.
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Deborah Frances-White
My guilty favourite is Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits. Smith is a scandalous, Wildean libertine with an Instagram account to match and his book, a guide to life, is a naughty little firecracker. My feminist favourite is A Thousand Ships. Natalie Haynes is a clever, classy classicist, and her book turns the Trojan War into a gripping feminist masterpiece, shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with every good reason.
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Debbie McGee
I’ve been reading The Science of Fate by neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow. My nephew bought it for me at Christmas and I’m really enjoying it. It’s so interesting as it discusses whether our fate is determined from birth, taking in child development and genetics. I’m also picking up lots of old copies of Good Housekeeping for some fresh tips and I’ve also been rereading my old cookery books. The Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi ones are brilliant and have some great breakfasts in them. There’s another one I like called The Pig, which has recipes accompanied by funny little tales.
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Tracy-Ann Oberman
I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light – there’s something so audacious about how she manages to flesh out that bygone world in a way I don’t think had ever been done before in historical fiction.
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Anne-Sophie Mutter
I’ve just finished Sprechen wir über Beethoven [“Let’s speak about Beethoven”] by the German journalist Eleonore Büning. It reveals the fascinating interconnections between Beethoven’s life and his works, and between the early and late pieces. Also I’ve gone back to French literature, which was my great love when I was a teenager, I loved Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and, of course, Camus. I have just started rereading Camus’s The Plague. It’s interesting that I can still relate to him, whereas some of my other favourite authors from my teens, like Hermann Hesse, now seem too flowery. It’s beautiful writing, but somehow not right for the present moment.
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Robert Lindsay
I spend most of my time reading. I’ve re-read Treasure Island, a book I’ve always loved because my real name is Robert Lindsay Stevenson. If it was up to my mother, I would have been Louis – it was my dad who insisted on Lindsay. I’m now reading Oliver Twist – an edition dated 1860, and a gift from Lionel Bart who I became great friends with before Cameron Mackintosh asked me to do [Fagin in] Oliver! at the Palladium. Lionel came a lot to my house in Buckinghamshire – he used to sit on the river-bank with me and say, “I love it here Bob, you know why? Cos it’s only eight miles from Acton”.
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Mark Strong
I brought down a whole bunch of scripts to our little place down in Sussex right on the edge of the Downs. I always find reading for pleasure diversionary and not as profound as something I’m going to be performing on stage. I did enjoy the coming-of-age story my wife wanted me to read called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, about a college baseball player aiming for a national championship.
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Barry Humphries
Well, lockdown’s a chance to tackle Robert Musil’s legendary three-volume masterwork The Man Without Qualities. Amazed to find it’s funny and gripping. Why was I scared off for so long? Laughing at every page of Bring on the Girls, the theatrical memoirs of Guy Bolton and PG Wodehouse. I’ve always been too snobbish to read Wodehouse, and now I’m addicted. He and Agatha Christie are the best British authors of the 20th century.
Craig Brown has written a long book about the Beatles – no book by Craig Brown is too long. Ringo is a friend of mine – I met him 30 years ago at Billy Connolly’s wedding on a snake-infested island near Fiji – but I have never been very interested in the Beatles. In fact I wouldn’t cross the road to see them... even Abbey Road. Yet I can’t put this wonderful book down.
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Hugo Vickers
As the days stretch without external commitments, now is a chance to read. I have collected books all my life. I love books about the American south. I have read Dotson Rader’s Tennessee – Cry of the Heart (bought in 1988), Casey Cep’s Furious Hours (2019), the astonishing account of murders in Alabama and Harper Lee’s attempt to unravel the story. This led me to Truman Capote – The Grass Harp (bought in 1991), and on to his short stories – A Tree of Night. My reading will continue like a knight’s move in Chess – I know not where.
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Indhu Rubasingham
I have a couple of books on the go. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne – about the ambition driving an aspiring (sociopathic) writer and the lengths to which he will go to become a literary hero. And there’s Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams – a novel about race, youth and love, which is very funny.
I am looking forward to reading Ayad Akhtar’s new novel Homeland Elegies, out in September. I have an early proof and it’s right up my street. It’s a deeply personal novel – an American son and his immigrant father search for belonging and reconciliation in the age of Trump. Ayad is a friend and collaborator, I had the deep pleasure of directing his play The Invisible Hand in 2016. To tell the truth, sometimes I find it hard to read – the preoccupation with the world let alone the worry of running the theatre takes the edge off relaxing.
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Russell Tovey
Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, a beautiful and incredibly moving autobiographical diary in which Jarman describes his creating his garden at Prospect Cottage, in Dungeness, Kent. It’s written as he deals with becoming sick [Jarman died of Aids in 1994] and really catches your heart. I was so delighted to hear recently that a crowdfunding campaign has raised £3.5 million to preserve Prospect Cottage. This is a great ray of sunshine, much needed in these unprecedented times.
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Jools Holland
I’ve been reading Maigret in a new translation. I have always liked Georges Simenon’s books, because with two or three sentences you are completely present in a room in a squatty suburb of Paris or rainy, decrepit mansion in Normandy. He wrote over 400 novels and claimed to have had 10,000 lovers. I was once told that he had to have sex every day with a different person before he could write anything, so I am not sure how he would have coped with lockdown.
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Diana Quick
I’m trudging my way through the nine hundred pages of the third instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & The Light. I read and enjoyed the first two, but I’m enjoying this one less, partly because it’s quite hard to hold it up: it’s such a mighty tome!
I think it’s too long – I know she’s got a lot of material to get through, but I feel daunted by the size of it. I take my hat off to her because Cromwell is a marvellous creation but it’s becoming a bit of a chore to finish it. I’ve spent a tiresome amount of time referring to her glossaries at the beginning to just remember who the characters are.
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Jane Horrocks
My daughter bought me a book called The Daily Stoic, which has a meditation for every day of the year. And my son bought me The Vortex by [spiritual gurus] Esther and Jerry Hicks. It’s good to keep positive right now.
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Dick Clement
A Carl Hiaasen novel called Lucky You. I’ve read it before but can’t remember the plot. This is partly for research. Ian and I are writing a screenplay set in Florida, and all his books take place there. For some reason he seems to like it. He’s very funny though. I liked him describing an unwanted visitor as “about as welcome as a cockroach on a wedding cake”.
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Elaine Paige
I’m reading Barry Humphries’s brilliantly funny autobiography My Life as Me, as well as Hugo Vickers’s The Sphinx, his life of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough. And a strange thing happened to me the other day. I was dusting the tops of my books – because you have to keep the place clean! – and this book fell towards me, by an Indian poet called Tagore. So, I put down the duster and found myself reading these wonderful poems for an hour. One went: “Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing/ dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.” I thought, My God, that’s so apt.
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Gilles Peterson
A beautiful surprise arrived through the letterbox from America, The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma by Ben Sidran, a musician, songwriter and author based in New York. I’m fascinated by the world of A&R, the mega producers and the history of how it all joins up. Tommy is one of the real greats, who I was honoured to spend time with in the Nineties working on an album, Nuyorican Soul, for my Talkin’ Loud label. Tommy ran labels for decades and produced Miles Davis, Neil Young, George Benson, Randy Crawford, Dr John. Amazing guy, and a fabulous book. It’s an independent, so look it up on the author’s website.
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Ruby Wax
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. I like to hear about people whose situations are worse than mine – I find it soothing. The darker it is, the lighter I feel. In this novel, the female protagonist is on the run from a Mexican drug cartel whose leader has fallen in love with her (when he’s wooing her she doesn’t realise he’s a drug lord – an easy mistake). He has most of her family gunned down. At every turn, your teeth are chattering.
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Christopher Wheeldon
I love children’s literature, so I’m finishing The Thief Lord, which was recommended to me by my author friend Brian Selznick, the man behind The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Another favourite is The Wave by Susan Casey, a gripping study of the monster-wave phenomenon and the big-wave surfers who tackle them. I’m about to get on to Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, gifted to me by my Japanese interpreter while working in Tokyo last year on An American In Paris. Ah, the good old days!
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Andrew Lloyd Webber
I’m reading lots. I’m enjoying God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs, which is all about the Vaux family and the terrible dilemmas they faced as Catholics in Elizabethan England.
My great loves are architecture and history, so I’ve been rereading two books by Nikolaus Pevsner: An Outline of European Architecture – if you’re starting on architecture, that’s the essential read – and The Englishness of English Art, in which he looks at what makes English art tick, an extraordinary achievement when you consider that he was German.
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Nikolai von Bismarck
Over the past few years I’ve accumulated an intimidating amount of books, which I now, finally, have time to read. Fittingly, I’m just finishing Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death. It’s about the plague in the mid-1300s, which coincidentally began in the Far East and entered Europe via warfare and trade routes through Italy. It really helped me put the current crisis into perspective.
I’m also halfway through The Wild Highway by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning, in which they take a trip to Zaire, travelling upriver in search of the Devil. It’s both hilarious and horrifying. Next up is photographer Don McCullin’s autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour – I admire him greatly.
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Rosalind Plowright
My sister, who’s a very literary person, has sent me Love is Blind by William Boyd. It’s about a piano tuner who has a dangerous affair, and is a sort of romantic thriller – really good, it takes my mind off things. But actually biographies are normally my thing. I’m a connoisseur of Maria Callas, I think I’ve read every book about her. She’d be my special topic on Mastermind. Callas is just about the only singer I want to listen to these days. It was listening to her recordings, especially the Tosca recording with Tito Gobbi, that inspired me to become a singer.
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Simon Callow
I’ve been recording a lot of stories and so on for various websites, and was moved to tears again by Wilde’s The Happy Prince, and relished Sredni Vashtar, the irresistibly vicious short story by Saki. Otherwise, for my own pleasure, I’m starting Julian Barnes’s elegant and resonant The Man in the Red Coat.
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Sara Paretsky
I’m catching up with Ann Cleeves’s Vera series, great fun. Also reading Luis Urrea’s House of Broken Angels – the sardonic humour and pulsing anger that underlie it bring vividly to life US-Mexican relations.
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David Crosby
I’ve been reading a lost novel by the great American science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein: The Pursuit of the Pankera. This is a treat for Heinlein fans: it’s kind of an alternative take on his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast, “a parallel novel about parallel universes”. This is a good time to escape into another dimension.
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Mark Watson
A very strangely appropriate book – Notes From an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. It’s a journalistic inquiry into the sort of people who think the world is going to end – millionaires who buy bunkers, or people who go into survival camps. When I ordered this book, it arrived the day all this chaos started to kick in.
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