The Books That Made Me
HORRIBLE HISTORIES by Terry Deary
These were probably the first books that I ever loved. I was an avid reader of old annuals that I picked up from jumble sales – Beano, Whizzer and Chips, that kind of thing – and the Horrible Histories series perfectly tapped into that sense of anarchy. I loved the fact that I was collecting lesser-known facts along the way, too. I don’t think I’d have ended up writing a comic murder mystery set during the 1910 Halley’s Comet Panic if I hadn’t read these from covet to cover, so you can blame Terry Deary for everything.
DOUBLE ACT by Jacqueline Wilson
As I kid, I became obsessed with Jacqueline Wilson when I realised how many books she’d written – 82 at the time, now well over a hundred. I loved that her books balanced gentle sweetness with gnarly reality (see: that paint scene in The Illustrated Mum). Double Act was always my favourite – I think because it was about twins with very different personalities, from both their viewpoints, and it reminded me of me and my sister. Ultimately, I love books with a central pair of slightly clashing personalities that spar against each other – that’s a real *chef’s kiss* ingredient for me.
ERIC by Terry Pratchett
This was the first Discworld book I ever read, chosen because it was the shortest, and I was 10 years old and I felt like I could handle it. It absolutely blew me away – I had no idea that books could be funny and sad and weird and imaginative, all at the same time. This was probably the moment that I first realised what books could do: that they didn’t really limitations, at least not in the sense that I was accustomed to at the time. You could make magic happen, if you were deft enough with it.
THE STAND by Stephen King
This was my first attempt at reading a massive book, when I was 12 or 13 (is that too young to read The Stand? Absolutely yes). The sweep of it was like nothing I’d ever encountered before – I can honestly say it cracked my head open. I read most of it on a holiday with a friend’s family in Cornwall, and when the holiday was over, then they put me on a four-hour train from Bodmin Parkway all the way back to Reading where my mum would pick me up. I finished the book while travelling alone for the very first time, looking out of the window at the landscape and listening to Stairway to Heaven on repeat on my MP3 watch, and I’ve never felt more like a grownup in my whole life.
THE NAME OF THE ROSE by Umberto Eco
What a strange, weird book. It only becomes truly weird when you remember how many copies it sold – over 50 million worldwide – and then you read it, and go, “Sorry – 50 million people read a medieval murder mystery about Franciscan monks and the politics of 1300s Italy and biblical analysis and lots of side-notes about monastery doorways and a library labyrinth?” Yeah, they did. It’s an absolute one-off – Conan Doyle meets Borges – and when I read it, in a sunny park with my face screwed up in bafflement and delight, it was the first moment that I thought you know what? murder mysteries are fun.
Ross Montgomery, Author of The Murder at World’s End
Fiction Book of the Month for November
