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August 2019 | REDONLINE.CO.UKreads
The Newsnight presenter has just published
her memoir, Airhead. Here, she reveals
the books that have shaped her life...MY FAVOURITE BOOK EVER
IS... The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt did
something truly extraordinary to my soul
that I still can’t work out. It swallowed
me up. I travelled
everywhere with it,
and even now there
are moments from my
real life I don’t quite
remember because the
fiction I was reading
overtook it.Emily Maitlis
THE LAST BOOK
THAT MADE ME
CRY IS... A Little Life.
Devastating and raw and
unforgiving. It made me
think a lot about friendship
and if I was a good enough
friend. And it made me
wonder whether the pain
of a bad childhood – for
this character – could ever
be undone. A painful and
sobering thought.
MY FAVOURITE LINE FROM A BOOK IS...
‘“Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Klara said. “If we all
had it there would be no history to write about,”’ from
Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. So much of this book
plays with the theme of ‘what if?’ It’s the book I relate
to most. Atkinson’s characters make me laugh; her women
are genuinely funny, even though the
men often can’t see it. She describes
what I call the seams of life – all
those places where things could have
been so wildly different: if a traffic
light had been green instead of red; if
a coat hadn’t got caught in a door. It’s
about the tiny shards of life that end
up having enormous significance.MY FAVOURITE LITERARY
CHARACTER IS... The
grandmother in My Grandmother
Sends Her Regards And
Apologises. What a beautiful
book. The grandmother
disappears quite early on, but
she still controls the unravelling
of the rest of the narrative and
how the characters come to meet
each other. I read it on holiday and
immediately passed it on to my son. We
both cried. It was such a pleasure to
find a book that crossed generations.MY FAVOURITE BOOK AS A
CHILD WAS... The Princess And
The Goblin and The Princess And
Curdie. I remember my mum reading
both to me and I was enthralled. I
also loved Joan Aiken’s Midnight Is A
Place. It’s about the terrible treatment
of Victorian children in a carpet
mill. Those scenes stayed with me.THE BOOK
I RECOMMEND TO
OTHERS IS... The Outcast by
Sadie Jones is breathtaking.
I also bought Caitlin Moran’s
How To Be A Woman for my
girlfriends; Moran wears her
politics deeply and easily. And
I recently went to Washington
DC where I bought copies
of Maria Semple’s Where’d
You Go, Bernadette from
Kramerbooks, which I gave
to everyone I could – like
a bizarre evangelist!
THE BOOK THAT GOT ME
THROUGH A DIFFICULT TIME IS...
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. I was 12, on
a French exchange trip and having a horrible,
lonely time. My French was rubbish, I wasn’t
trendy enough for my Parisian friend and her
mates, and I buried myself in my novels as
an escape from feeling rubbish during those
weeks. I was so grateful to have books with me.Airhead: The Imperfect Art Of Making News (Michael Joseph, £18.99) by Emily Maitlis is out now