10/18/2017
Women & Their Books: Rosalind Jana
Two of my favourite things are inspiring women and books. I literally came up with the idea for this new series one morning on my train to work and was so excited, I hurriedly emailed Rosalind to ask if she'd be the first woman to talk all things literary. Much to my excitement she said yes and I can tell you, it's been tough for me to keep quiet about this series until now. I am hoping to include women from on and off the interwebs, regular ladies and perhaps even the odd gent or two if they want to get involved.
Rosalind Jana, formerly known around the blogosphere as Clothes, Cameras & Coffee first came to my attention last year c/o Emma Gannon and her Ctrl Alt; Delete podcast but I'd actually been exposed to her work years earlier in Violet magazine without even realising. She is incredibly talented, having shared her voice in both poetry and nonfiction books as well as being Junior Editor at Violet magazine. She won the British Vogue Talent Contest when she was sixteen and is a regular contributor to SUITCASE magazine. She's a busy, busy lady so I feel very honoured she took the time to answer my questions and share what books and female writers have inspired her thus far.
-What are you
currently reading?
I’ve been picking up and putting down Extraordinary Women for ages now. It’s a little known romp of a
read set in Europe during the early twentieth century - a fictionalised
reimagining of various queer women (including Radclyffe Hall) and their exploits.
Very silly. Very fun. Lots of ravishing descriptions of the main character
Rosalba. I’m very promiscuous with my reading though, so I’m also in the midst
of Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man*,
WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Teju
Cole’s Known and Strange Things, and
my friend Rosie Findlay’s wonderful book Personal Style Blogs: Appearances That Fascinate. Oh, and I’ve been diving back into
Eva Ibbotson recently too. I just read A Countess Below Stairs, which is among the most joyous books I’ve ever
encountered.
-What is your most
read book?
Great question! It’s possibly a tie between Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning and Angela Carter’s Wise Children.
I’ve returned to both of them so many times. I guess they’re almost like
comfort reads in some respects (though the real equivalent of a cup of tea
under a blanket on a bad day is The Moomins: Tove Jansson has seen me through some dark times. And some sunny
ones too, admittedly!) Lee’s prose is so evocative. It’s the book that made me
fall in love with travel writing. And Carter has long been a favourite. I love
how this book fizzes with revelry and mischief and artifice, all the while
paying homage to Shakespeare in a very rambunctious fashion.
-As a gifted writer
yourself, is there any book in particular that inspires your writing and/or
makes you want to write?
Thank you! I hope I glean things from everything I read:
whether it encourages me to work ever harder on my own projects, or I find it
frustrating and want to unpick what didn’t work. A few books that have recently
made me want to pick up my pen (well, more accurately hunch over my laptop)
would include Ali Smith’s Artful,
Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent,
Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and,
forever and always, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Essays-wise, I always dip back into Woolf and Hilary
Mantel when I need a real jolt of prose. Oh, and Alan Garner’s The Stone Book! That’s so dense and
compact and mesmerising. There’s lots of poetry too, but I should stop already.
I think what all those works – and so many others – share is
a real sense of exhilaration at what you can do with language, whether in the
rhythm of a sentence, the twists of a satisfying story, or a particular
precision of thought. Reading other people’s work and being both in awe and
VERY envious of them really is a helpful spur.
-You’ve recently been
travelling to Canada and Japan. What did you read while you were there? Did you
pick up any local literature?
Very good question. I didn’t have much time for reading
while actually in Japan – but I did gobble up lots on the plane trip there. I
sped through Katherine Rundell’s The Explorer (Rundell is a delicious children’s writer whose books invariably
make me want to weep/ laugh/ go climb rooftops in Paris, run with wolves in
Russia, and battle my way through the Amazon), and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal, which is full of deft
observations on teenage girls, school, and sexuality.
On Fogo Island I read continuously, returning to Maggie
Nelson’s Bluets (even better with the
backdrop of the roaring North Atlantic behind), and deliving into Margaret
Atwood’s Surfacing (had to have at
least one Canadian author in there!), Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (a superlatively good piece of nature writing),
and various others. I also bought Diana Vreeland’s autobiography in a second
hand bookshop in St John’s on my way back home. It’s ridiculous and over the
top and I love it.
To my shame though, I didn’t manage to pick up any local
literature in either!
-What is your
favourite book by a British writer and why?
Is it a cliché to say Wuthering Heights? Probably. I don’t
care. (Also, this is an IMPOSSIBLE question. I have so many favourites, especially
when it comes to British writers, from Hilary Mantel to Alan Garner to Ali
Smith to Saki to Jeanette Winterson to Jenny Diski to John Berger and beyond).
-Which women writer’s
words have left a lasting impression on you?
Virginia Woolf, forever and always. From her astutely
observed essays to the incandescent thrill of books like Orlando, I feel like I’m forever trying to get to grips with the
depths of her works, despite having read many of them several times (I did my
undergraduate dissertation on her). She continually reminds me of the flexibilities
and possibilities of words, as well as the challenges they can present.
-Finally, if there
was one book you’d recommend every woman have on their bookshelf, which would
it be?
Similarly difficult to answer, given that I don’t think
there’s any one thing we should all absolutely have to read. It’s going to
depend on your tastes, your priorities etc. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists is a pretty
safe/ necessary bet though.
// Thank you so much to Rosalind for being the first radtastic lady to contribute to this series. I hope you all enjoyed it. Be sure to give Rosalind a follow, her Instagram is especially dreamy. Stay tuned next month for another installment of this new series. //
*Book Depository affiliate links may have been used but where possible I am linking to my two favourite local bookstores. Shout out to you Unity Books and Time Out.
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