My earliest readingmemory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn’t.
My favourite bookgrowing up
Impossible. I’m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let’s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfectof Tove Jansson’s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, at 14. Iloathed it. It nearly turned me off reading for ever. Everyone kept telling me it was a masterpiece and I just couldn’t understand why [school would] set abook about being an alienated child for a bunch of teenagers. “Yes, I know adults are incomprehensible and other people make no sense and loneliness is awful. Why do I need to read about it?”
The writer who changedmy mind
Tan Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists is a stunning novel – jaw-dropping, beautiful, intricate, elegant, powerful, touching – and made me see how books about terrible things can be uplifting to the point oftranscendent. As I type that it seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me then.
The book that made mewant to be a writer
Ah. That one’s a little bit tricky, because I’ve always been immersed in writing. I can tell you that Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is so good that it infuriated me into starting a new novel, and that everything I’ve read by Michael Chabon has filled me with a furious creative envy that makes me work harder. Jeanette Winterson is some kind of perfect dreamer; Anne Carson and Colson Whitehead always make me feel like I should be wilder, wiser and better. But perhaps the honour has to go to AMurder of Quality by John le Carré. My father gave me a leather-bound copy when I was very young, and the smell of the pages and the beauty of the object itself made me believe inthe magic of words.
The book Icame back to
We’re back with GreatExpectations. Itreally is a brilliant book, but we shouldn’t force it on teenagers. That’s not to say they shouldn’t read it if they want to. But just because it’s about young people doesn’t mean it’s written for them; it’swritten for the rest ofus remembering whowe were.
The book I reread
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read it asa child and scared myself sleepless, then at university and chuckled at my tween fear, and again more recently, conscious at last not of the monstrosity of the hound, but the astounding cruelty ofits master.
The book I could neverread again
Almost every book I read for fun between seven and 17. I actually don’t remember what they were, so I can’t name and shame, but that is some kind of judgment in itself. To highlight instead some of the notable exceptions: Susan Cooper’s Dark IsRising sequence, Patricia McKillip’s harpist trilogy, and all things William Gibson.
The book I discovered later in life
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.
The book I am currentlyreading
Matt Wixey’s Basilisk. And, with my kids, I’mreading the latestAmari Peters book, Amari and the Despicable Wonders byBB Alston. It’s very tense and I don’t know how she can possibly winthrough!
My comfort read
Spook Country by William Gibson, who I mentioned earlier, of course, but this is one of his later books and for me it’sjust superb. Theaudiobook, read by Robertson Dean, is also agem. The texture of the prose, the encounter between mundane and strange, the magic of story … it’s a good place to spend an evening.
