There’s nothing quite like those big papery things to lose yourself in or lose a cherished family member to.
Books furnish a life, says Richard Dawkins, and in an exclusive interview with The Medical Republic Professor Candid discusses the books that have furnished his life the most and other furniture-related anecdotes.
I was a rather precocious child. I could read before I was three months old and I’d devoured Ulysses before I was taking solids. But the book that I remember the most from my childhood and the one that stands out has to be Fhatag’s Cat.
For the uninitiated, Fhatag’s Cat is a Swedish tale about a tortoiseshell cat who grew up in a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane. The book describes Fhatag’s whimsical, often jaunty escapades and is structured a bit like Anne of Green Gables but with way more murders and feline syncytial virus.
To this day I’m terrified of cats, especially if they’re holding a knife with their little prehensile paws.
When I went to primary school there were a great many more books to choose from and naturally I gravitated toward the sciences, especially biology. I remember many a thrilling evening hiding under the blanket with my torch learning all about skeletons and bears and radioactivity and naughty bits.
At high school I made the decision to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a doctor.
It’s a rather poignant story: just before he died he invited me into his library and handed me the textbook that he used when he was a medical student. He said “Take this book, son, it has served me well”, and then screamed “euccchhhhhhhhhhhhhh” as the bookcase fell on him.
My father’s textbook describes how pipe smoke can cure just about anything, including polio, nicotine addiction, childhood asthma and diabetes. Unfortunately it can’t cure being crushed by a badly built and top-heavy book case.
At university the textbook that became my bible was AR Larkin’s Pathology. The book was so colossal that I had to rent a plot of land just for somewhere to put it. To this day it remains the definitive work on the subject. Also, it has loads of gross-out pictures in it including some poor fella with trench foot and a lady with an axe stuck in her head.
After medical school I studied for a PhD in animal behaviourism and it was about this time that I co-authored my first book with the Danish polymath Dr Oematily Socts. The book describes in boorish detail how we took a common or garden brown rat called Hamish and turned him into a common or garden high school chemistry teacher, also called Hamish. Those were the days, no ethics committees, no red tape, just dreams, stuffed pipes and a perverse desire to torture rats.
Since then I’ve pursued other passions outside of medicine and have co-authored several books including:
(Why do medieval knights hate snails so much?)
And my self-published bestseller:
It’s true, reading books is becoming less popular, but there’s nothing quite like opening a new book in a bookshop or an old book in an even older-bookshop and sniffing its pages and being reminded to secure your bookshelves to the wall.
