My earliest reading memory
At primary school the class had Mr and Mrs Peg readers with green covers; mine was red, the only one. I was more or less left to my own devices. At home my mother read me Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Dimly – I think – I perceived these young people were “growing up”.
The book that changed my mind.
Aged ten or eleven I was lent a Peter Cheyney “Saint” thriller (title forgotten). Again, the details are vague, but I wanted to read more because of the style in which it was written. Laconic, mainly. I recognised style in later books by other authors.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I’ve always disliked novels about novel writers. Saw them as cop-outs from sedentary males who rarely stirred out of their mancaves. Raymond Chandler’s The High Window transfixed me by treating grim events humorously, managing to be moralistic without being pious. Much later came Ulysses, an infinity of possibilities, the unattainable goal.
The book I discovered late in life
Very late in life came poetry (other than Shakespeare) and with it Louise Gluck’s Poems 1962 -2012. Simple, even mundane, material becomes plutonium.
The book I’m currently reading
Wayne Barne’s Throwing the Book. He’s a retired rugby football referee. (Also a barrister). No great shakes as a writer but there are truths even in sport. And commercialism is one of sport’s untruths. Nothing in it for anyone who is unaware of Ireland’s present predominance in rugby. As Walt Whitman said: my life is full of contradictions
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