Omnivore Pin-up: Tadzio, 27, North London
Part-time poet and full-time pervert (self-proclaimed), Tadzio is a 27-year-old pedagogue. If you don’t want to read any of the books or poems he mentions, there’s something wrong with you. Ask Michael out via love@theomnivore.com.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. Bizarre, magical and deeply moving, it begins with an errant snowball and ends in tragedy and wonder.
What have you just finished reading?
I’ve just finished reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Impossibly creepy American Gothic in which one guesses at the family poisoner. Jackson is massively underrated but her critical star is rising.
What will you read next?
I’ve got the Robertson Davies bug and I’m going to read The Cornish Trilogy but after that I’m itching to read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun. He’s a Polish travel writer who tends towards magical realism. Pretentious, moi?
Which author do you have a crush on?
I have a crush on Michael Cunningham – former subject of the winning Hatchet Job of the Year. I wrote him an email in breathless praise of The Hours but he never replied. It’s still a sore point, actually.
What’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever read?
Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears depressive but is actually playful and deeply erotic. It’s all about masturbating in graveyards and I can’t help find that – from a 19th century New England Puritan female – extremely exciting.
Which book would you give someone you’re trying to impress?
I think I would give them Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, the “golden book” which corrupts Dorian Gray. It’s a strange novel with only one character – an infertile aristocrat who spends his days rebinding his books of Latin poetry, drinking absinthe and mixing perfumes. I’m still single.
