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.
