My earliest reading memory
My father reading the poems of Ogden Nash. He delighted in silliness, and I delighted in anything he found funny, and so they have stayed vivid since earliest childhood, unlike anything I was later made to memorise at school. At six I learned that “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker”. Sound advice, even if it came a little early.
My favourite book growing up
Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I longed also to be left on my own island, alone with only my ingenuity and a feral wolf for company. It made childhood seem not a time of powerlessness but of such competence and courage.
