An interview with Martin Millar

Again, stolen from Shelf Awareness.

Martin Millar is Scottish, from Glasgow, but has lived in London for a long time. He writes books under his own name and has also written a series about Thraxas under the name of Martin Scott--in 2002 he won the World Fantasy Award for Thraxas. He's published 16 books, "sometimes successful, sometimes not so successful." Soft Skull Press has been publishing Millar in the U.S., with Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation, The Good Faeries of New York, Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me and Lonely Werewolf Girl. His latest is a novel, Lux the Poet, is being published this month.

On your nightstand now:

Complete Letters of Pliny the Younger. His correspondence dates from 97-112 A.D., and contains all sorts of fascinating information about ancient Rome, including his first-hand account of the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii. I'm interested in anything from ancient Rome and Greece.

Also, quite a few volumes of manga, including Claymore by Norihiro Yagi, Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto and others. I like Japanese comics, and recently I've been reading a lot of them.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Biggles books by Captain W. E. Johns. Biggles was a fighter pilot in the First World War. As I child, I often imagined myself heroically piloting a Sopwith Camel biplane over enemy lines.

Your top five authors:

P. G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, Cicero. I appear to be living in the past.

Book you've faked reading:

Moby Dick. Turgid. I hated it. Nothing would induce me to finish it. But I did pretend to read it because a girl I knew really liked it. Seems strange now I think about it. Why on earth did she like Moby Dick so much?

Book you're an evangelist for:

Hmm. I can't think of any. If I was recommending anything, it would probably be Somerset Maugham, but I doubt anyone would listen. He was a really fine storyteller. His writing was quite plain and unadorned, and I like that.

Book you've bought for the cover:

None that I can remember.

Book that changed your life:

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I doubt I'd have got started on my writing career if I hadn't read that. That led me on to Slaughterhouse-Five, which was also a very important influence.

Favorite line from a book:

"A lesser man, caught in this awful snare, would no doubt have ceased to struggle; but the whole point about the Woosters is that they are not lesser men."--From Right Ho Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse. (I've borrowed and adapted that line a few times.)

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

I wish I could read all the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse again for the first time. They're the funniest books ever written.

Name a really great filmed version of a book:

Election, a novel by Tom Perrotta, film version directed by Alexander Payne, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Election was a good novel, and I thought the film version was brilliant.