Fare Forward: Why is it important to you to tell stories? What do you think it is about humans that we are so compelled to tell stories, about what has happened or might happen or certainly will not happen but would be wonderful or terrible if it did?

Jo Walton: The way you ask that question makes me wonder what it is you’re contrasting story-telling humans against. Animals? Aliens? Angels? Ghosts? God? Gods? We know some animals tell stories—the bluetits of England who learned to take the foil caps off milk bottles left on doorsteps in the 1930s (to enjoy drinking the cream at the top of the milk) and who remembered how to do it after six long years of WWII with no doorstep milk. They had passed the skill of the cap removal down through three bluetit generations, and yet to the middle generation who had never seen a milk bottle and never would see one it must have seemed a legend they were passing on. I think stories are fundamental to the way we understand the world and our lives. There’s an easy answer that the stories teach us how to get at the cream, like those bluetits. We learn skills from stories, skills like being kind to strangers and the dangers and wonders of agreeing to exchange the cow for a handful of beans. But it’s more than that, even though stories are how we learn they don’t just give us distilled wisdom of the elders, there’s also something deeply satisfying in reading about something coming out the way it’s supposed to. There’s a line in Doctor Seuss’s Horton Hatches an Egg “And it should be, it should be, it should be like that! Because Horton was faithful, he sat and he sat…” and while life is muddled and complex and always going on all around us there’s something very satisfying about a fictional story where things work out the way they should and it is over at the end. Myself I tell stories because I like stories, and I write the kind of stories I like to read.

FF: You have said in other interviews that you read purely for pleasure, most of the time, and not to fulfill anyone’s expectations or to improve yourself. What are you reading right now, and what is great about it?

JW: So I write a monthly column for Tor.com called “Jo Walton’s Reading List” where I list everything I read that month and write a bit about it, and if you want to know what I’m reading specifically you should look at that, I don’t want to repeat myself. But I’ll answer a question you didn’t ask, about what kinds of things I read. Since I started reading primarily on the Kindle I’ve developed over the last decade a habit of reading sixteen books at a time. And I am always reading two novels, one SF or fantasy and one in some genre that isn’t SF or fantasy—mystery, romance, mainstream, whatever. And I am always reading two books of short stories, usually one a single author collection and one an anthology. Similarly I’m always reading two books of poetry, usually one single author and one an anthology. And I’m always reading two books of letters, always from different centuries. Also, I am always reading something translated from Greek or Latin, which can be anything, and also something that is a significant work translated from a language that isn’t Greek or Latin. In this category I’ve read Don Quixote, Miklos Banffy’s Translyvanian Trilogy, The Tale of Genji, the Ramayana, the Bible, a bunch of Italo Calvino, Les Miserables, War and Peace—so it can be anything. Then I’m always reading a book on Italian Renaissance history and another book that’s Renaissance history adjacent. I’m always reading one book of history of some other period and place entirely. I’m usually reading one travel memoir. And the other two books can be any kind of nonfiction! And what I do is that I read a few chapters of one of the novels and then I read a chapter each of three other things, then a few chapters of the other novel, and then a chapter each of three other things, then a chapter of the Italian Renaissance book, then a chapter each of three other things, and back to the first novel. If I am really enjoying something, I’ll just keep on reading it, so sometimes I will read a whole book without a break for other things, but mostly I read like this. It sounds really artificial when I describe it, but I developed it organically, and it’s comfortable and I like it. And it lets me embark on really long things without needing to be swamped by them. It’s hard to sit down and read the whole of the Bible and not read anything else, but thinking OK, I’ll be reading this for a year probably, but in little chunks, interspersed with other things, that makes it manageable. And it also means I’m always finishing things and starting new things, but I never finish everything all at once, so the changeover is gradual, there’s continuity. I’m not suggesting anyone else try this. People need to do their pleasure reading in a way that’s a pleasure for them! But this works for me.