The books of my life

Richard Armitage: ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’

The actor and author on his love of fantasy fiction, the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, and why he doesn’t want a second bite of Proust
Richard Armitage
Fri 27 Oct 2023 11.00 CEST
Last modified on Fri 27 Oct 2023 13.21 CEST

My earliest reading memory
Enid Blyton at about seven. It was The Magic Faraway Tree. My local newsagents sold them, and I read a book a week, moving through The Wishing Chair to Brer Rabbit and all The Famous Five.

My favourite book growing up
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. The transformative nature of a doorway into a parallel world is something I think both children and adults dream about. I can still remember the hair-raising thrill I felt when Lucy first meets Mr Tumnus in the Narnian winter woodland as the dark evening sets in.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Lord of the Rings which I read when I was 13. I had a single edition of all three books which I used to stand on to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe. I read it very slowly from cover to cover. I became one of the Fellowship, I was fully immersed, fully transported. I remember crying when it was all over. Who would have thought nearly 28 years later, I would be playing Thorin Oakenshield in the movie of The Hobbit?

The writer who changed my mind
Stephen King. I’ve always shied away from genre. I don’t like extreme violence, so the darker aspects of horror or crime had always alienated me until I read The Shining. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo.

The book that made me want to be a writer
A Passage to India by EM Forster. At 16 it was on the reading list for A-level. Forster’s vivid description of India at the turn of the century really drew me into its many-layered drama of colonialism, racism and gender politics. It’s the story of a British Raj that is broken and rotten at the core.

The book I came back to
The Grapes of Wrath. This is one of those books that I felt I should have read. Then in 2020, aged 49, I was asked to narrate it for Audible, a daunting task because of the variety of Oklahoma dialects. It was a revelation. Steinbeck brilliantly articulates the familial survival instinct that will push through and seek the tiniest glimmer of sunlight in a very dark sky.

The book I reread
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The diary of the Roman Emperor, a stoic philosopher, was never meant to be published. These are words of advice to the self written nearly 2,000 years ago. Aurelius muses that it’s not death that a man should fear but never beginning to live. I was performing Astrov in Uncle Vanya in 2019 on the edge of the pandemic lockdown; a speech of Astrov’s about embracing mortality made me realise that Chekhov must have read Marcus Aurelius; it was almost verbatim.

The book I could never read again
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Proust. At my drama school, Lamda, we had a second-year long project to adapt In Search of Lost Time for the stage. Over the seven volumes of the diaries, Proust conjures a country childhood, jealous obsessions, high society and its homoerotic underbelly; the decadent Baron de Charlus is an extraordinary tragicomic character. But even after a year, the book was impossible to fully digest. Also, in our subsequent adaptation, I was cast as an older Proust looking back on his life, so was glued to a chair for two hours while my classmates galavanted around the stage having fun. Never again!

The book I am currently reading
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. A shocking exploration of the Sackler family and the proliferation of prescription narcotic OxyContin. I have Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Complete Poems in the reading queue.

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My comfort read
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. If you haven’t read it, open the book around 19 December and begin.

Geneva by Richard Armitage is published by Faber (£16.99).