
Riot Asks: Interview with Patrick Taylor
Leap Day comes just once every four years–and since it’s a rare day, too, when author Patrick Taylor visits Brooklyn, it was fitting that last week on February 29th Taylor made his only New York appearance for his latest book, An Irish Country Girl, at the Carroll Gardens Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Since we’re all about Brooklyn here at Book Riot, we took the opportunity afterwards to pepper the Irish-born, Canadian-bound writer with our reader-focused “Riot Asks” questions.
BOOK RIOT: What are you reading?
PATRICK TAYLOR: Well, I’m reading Wilbur Smith’s For Those in Peril on the Sea, a paperback thriller, because that’s all I could find at the airport! I just finished reading a collection of Wilkie Collins short stories before that; did you know he even has one about the first woman detective? It’s true! She’s a seamstress waiting for the man she loves to come home from America, and she’s broke–but she tracks down a murderer. Great stuff. I mostly read nonfiction, because if I read vast amounts of fiction I couldn’t write myself, as you see most of the good writers are so much better than me that I get discouraged and start writing in their style. But I did read quite a bit of fiction since for the past two and a half months we’ve been in Tenerife. I’m not a golfer and I’m not the type to sit in the sun, so when I’m on vacation I read.
BR: Which book do you wish you had written?
PT: Without a doubt, A Tale of Two Cities. However, there’s another one, much lesser know: The Citadel by A.J. Cronin. It’s about a young doctor who took a dim view of the Harley Street types who would inject patients with little more than sterile water and charge them a guinea. Cronin was a socialist, you see. He also happened to be a remarkable storyteller.