It was my sister who first taught me to read, before I even went to school. She’d plonk me amongst a motley assortment of teddy bears, soft toys and dolls, in a circle and read Peter and Jane to us. I’m sure they’re horribly dated now for I haven’t seen a copy in years but for those of you too young to remember, they had one or two short sentences in GIANT BIG FONT on one side of the page and a rather naff illustration on the facing page. At the bottom, it would say ‘New word – dog’ or whatever. They’ve been much mocked (I particularly love Miriam Elia’s spoofs) but I’ll always be grateful to them for kick-starting my reading.
After I’d mastered the basics, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. My library card enabled me to get up to ten books out at any time (the fools!) so that’s what I did – every week, ten books! I read BB’s fictionalised stories of animals and gnomes (The Lord of the Forest remains one of my favourites), I read The Borrowers by Mary Norton and all of Narnia. I read Sheila Lavelle’s My Best Fiend and Lucy M Boston’s Green Knowe series. I read anything, everything. And then, towards the end of junior school, I had the legendary Mr Peter Frowde as a teacher. Not only did he bring his pet Russian hamsters into school and tell us they were rubbish pets as they were nocturnal and it meant his son couldn’t sleep at night because of the sound of the wheel squeaking, he introduced me to Michael Rosen’s work. He read out short segments of Quick, Let’s Get Out of Here and they blew my ten year old mind. I genuinely thought (and still have a suspicion) Michael Rosen had been spying on me. There were stories about a tomboy who liked football, the only girl to play alongside the boys, and she was even called Lizzie. There were stories about Eddie the naughty toddler which made me cry with laughter. It’s a joy of a book, one to return to again and again, and I’ve pushed numerous copies into people’s hands over the years. I also devoured Lloyd Alexander’s massively under-rated Prydain Chronicles. Trust me, they’re so much better than The Lord of the Rings, they’re funny and gripping and have a cracking female main character, they truly deserve to be better known.
As a teen, I moved onto what little YA fiction there was at the time in our school library, Judy Blume and Paula Danziger mostly (still a big fan of The Pistachio Prescription!) and the saccharine Sweet Valley High series, the book equivalent of Haribo, terribly moreish although the world of perfectly manicured Californian girls felt a world away from my bog standard secondary school. I moved onto adult fiction at around this time too. I read Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, the Brontes, and Austen, and I loved sci-fi and fantasy on the screen so turned to that in my reading too, I read Arthur C Clarke and Margaret Atwood, Alan Garner and Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury and HG Wells (a master of short stories, highly recommended). At secondary school, I discovered a love of the theatre, thanks to the amazing Sheila Morrissey, my drama teacher. I went to the theatre and saw lots of plays and I read them too, Shakespeare (of course) and Marlowe, Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard. I still rather like reading plays and film-scripts, it’s so interesting and inspiring to read stories told in different ways. One of my favourite short descriptions of anything ever is in the screenplay of LA Confidential. A description of a police storage room as ‘a size 16 office in a size 12 space’. If you know the film well, you’ll know that very scene.
As time went on, I wrote more and more myself. Poems and plays, short stories, children’s books, film-scripts. I think I was working out who I was as a writer, the sort of stories I wanted to tell and the medium in which I wanted to tell them. The thing that always draws me into a book is a ruddy good story above all else. For me, that’s the same with non-fiction as well as fiction, writers like Malcolm Gladwell or Wendy Moore, Claire Tomalin and Kathryn Hughes, all of whom write fantastically engaging, absorbing non-fiction. And I find myself increasingly drawn to towards fiction that has a strong sense of place too, writers like Isabel Allende and George Mackay Brown, Alan Garner and Rebecca F John. I want my books to feel immersive, so that as you turn the pages, you fall into a whole other world that feels visceral, touchable, utterly real. That when you look up, you find yourself startled to still be sitting in a chair, reading. They’re the sort of books I’ve always loved most and that’s what I always try and aspire to do in my writing too.
The truth of it is that all of the above have shaped me in some way, along with countless other books and authors that I don’t have time or space to truly enthuse about, writers like Catherine Johnson and Marcus Sedgwick, Philip Reeve and Patrice Lawrence. Writers like Jackie Morris and Nicola Davies, Derren Brown and Frances Hardinge, Garth Nix and Joe Abercrombie, Stacey Halls and Daisy Johnson. Everything I read shapes me in some way, from newspaper articles and blogs to books, and that’s not even touching on music or film and TV! It all shapes me, it inspires and frustrates, angers and enthuses, and I know, I just know, that between the time of me writing this blog and it going up online, I’ll have thought of another two dozen writers that I wish I’d mentioned to. What riches we have, what brilliant writers at our fingertips, from hundreds of years ago to now, a golden age of writing. Long may it continue.