I was this weird little bookish giant.
My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.
To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation.
As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.
I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.
I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.
My writing works best when I remember that bookish child who adored reading and gear the work toward him.
I'm a pretty bookish person.
I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.
I went to something like six different schools before the age of 12, so I was always the new girl and had to make friends quickly. It was difficult at the start because I was very bookish - I was literally sat in the corner reading books, with no friends.
