My earliest reading memory
My mother taught me how to read. I was happy enough in school but at some point she must have realised that I wasn’t learning anything; I think I was seven. So my earliest memory of reading is sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, looking at a comic called Sparky. Her finger was under a word in one of the speech bubbles, and I recognised it, and the next one, and the next. I was up and running. By the end of the next day, I’d finished Nietzsche and had moved on to Dostoevsky.
My favourite book growing up
When I was 10 or 11 I probably knew Richmal Crompton’s Just William off by heart. There were two things about the book that I loved, and still do: William always got away with it, and the adults were idiots.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds when I was 16. It was the first time I’d seen the Dublin accent on paper. It was an extraordinary experience, seeing what I heard every day on the page, and laughing at it because it was so funny and great.
The writer who changed my mind
I don’t remember ever having my mind changed as I read a book, but Richard Dawkins almost made me change my mind about the non-existence of God after I read The God Delusion. It’s not that I had doubts; I just didn’t want to be on Dawkins’s side.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Reading EL Doctorow’s Ragtime when I was 18 or 19 convinced me that I could write. The mix of fictional characters and real people, the way the music was described, the sheer magic of it: I ended up thinking, like Yosser Hughes, “I could do that.”
The book I reread
I’ve read Dickens’s Great Expectations five or six times. It seems to get better, and darker, as I get older. Somewhere during the third reading, I stopped being Pip and became Joe, and “What larks, Pip” became one of the most heartbreaking lines ever written.
The book I could never read again
I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller when I was 16 and it was, three pages in, the best, the funniest, wildest book I’d ever read. I started to read it again about 10 years ago and couldn’t get past five pages. It was tedious, and as unfunny as it had been funny. I’ve no doubt it’s a masterpiece, but it’s a young reader’s masterpiece. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was the same – a pain in the arse. Maybe I should just stay away from books with numbers in the titles.
The book I discovered later in life
I’ll let you know when I get there.
The book I am currently reading
Tim Shipman’s No Way Out, the third part of his Brexit saga. The neighbours’ difficulties are always a balm to the soul.
My comfort read
When I want a laugh and a Britain free of Farage or food banks, I read PG Wodehouse. I’m not mad about audiobooks, but I had to stop driving once when I was listening to The Code of the Woosters, because I couldn’t stop laughing and my glasses were fogging. I was driving through County Mayo but I couldn’t see the mountains, the weather or the oncoming traffic.
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