In Conversation: Rick Gekoski  

Author, reading addict, former Man Booker Award judge, and rare book dealer, Rick Gekoski, attended the March World Book Day event, hosted by the University of Otago’s Centre for the Book. Dunedin Public Libraries' Collection Specialist, Jackie McMillan, caught up with him there.


ON COINING A WORD

We began by discussing Rick’s 2009 book, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir. I asked Rick if he had coined the word ‘bibliomemoir.’ In answer he quoted two lines from Through the Looking Glass, where Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, “It is my word, it will mean just what I say it means” and “when I make a word work that hard I always pay it extra.” He joked, “I’d be thoroughly pleased if bibliomemoir got into the Oxford English Dictionary, especially if they quote me first.” He thought that the word had occurred occasionally before he’d used it, and maybe he had purposely adapted it and changed its meaning, so that it now meant a memoir of a reader (rather than the story behind certain books, like his Tolkien’s Gown). The premise for Outside of a Dog, Rick explained, is like the popular idea that you are what you eat; thus, you are what you read. “So, for some of us there is some truth in that. For me it is totally true.”

ON READING STORIES

I asked Rick if he therefore thought reading was always good for us. “Clearly there is no real evidence that reading is good for you, or that it is morally enhancing, or even that it can give you a refined sensibility. There are good people who don’t or can’t read; however stories are always important, because we are hard-wired for stories, even if it is simply the story of your wicked Uncle Stanley. Literacy, however, is a good thing and is essential.” There are, he pointed out, more and more forms of communication that require literacy and, “literacy can also help you avoid being hoodwinked.”

According to Rick, children hunger for stories, and they insist on the same stories read over again and again. Even though they cannot yet read, children will continue to mouth the words of stories. He recalled that as a child he was enamoured with Dr. Seuss’s character Horton the Elephant and would go around the house repeating, “He was an immense creature.” Stories and reading play an important role in children’s lives particularly; “children are bundles of self-interest and egotism, and the more stories they read, the more they see that other people are like them, and that they have their own rights too. And it takes forever to learn that lesson and most people don’t learn it.”

Reading is a total joy to Rick. He has a good friend who cannot understand why he reads fiction; his friend reads history books. Rick says, “History is full of odd coincidences, accidents and contingencies. You read fiction is to learn more about the real world, and not less, … fiction gives you access to the interiority of others.”

ON JUDGING THE MAN BOOKER

I asked Rick whether judging the Man Booker had diminished his pleasure in reading, even temporarily. “It was my idea of fun to read a book every day. The problem was only the really long ones. If they were 200-300 pages I could read one a day, if they were 800 pages they took two days. But you don’t have to read them all. At least twenty per cent of them are rubbish.” A more experienced judge, John Sutherland, told him you don’t have to eat the whole fish to know that it has gone off. So he would take a forty page bite.

I asked Rick if there were any writers, from his year as a judge in 2005, who he continued to read for pleasure. “A lot – we had a fantastic year: John Banville (who won with The Sea), Sebastian Barry, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro. There were also some really good writers who didn’t even make the short list that year, like Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee.” Rick also considered himself fortunate to have afterwards become friends with a number of the writers.

ON READING WHILST WRITING

For the past eighteen months Rick has been writing his first novel. So as not to distract himself, Rick cut down his usual breadth and depth of reading. He decided to only read thrillers. (He has written about his thriller addiction in Outside of a Dog.) He told me wryly, “It is a terrible sadness to me that my favourite thriller writers only write one novel per year.” The authors he loves are: Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben and Patricia Cornwall. He likes Scott Turow a lot, and also James Lee Burke.

The biographies that Rick most enjoys are about writers. He particularly enjoyed a recent biography of John Updike, and he had (in March) just started reading the recent John Le Carré biography by Adam Sisman. He finds the parallels between writers’ lives and their writing fascinating: “What leads writers to that spark, or a particular paragraph or phrase, the act of composition: that remains a mystery. I’ve always believed that, short of architects and musicians, novelists are the most creative people.”

Rick always believed that he could not write a novel himself, because – unlike writers like John Updike – he does not notice little incidental details. However, as he approached his seventieth birthday, something changed: “All of a sudden a voice came into my head, in the first person, with a rude comment about T. S. Eliot. I love T. S. Eliot, and I thought ‘I don’t feel that,’ so I thought I would start writing down that voice and see what happens.”

Rick Gekoski’s first novel is due to be published in April next year.