My earliest reading memory
The page-turning, heart-stopping danger when Peter, Jane, the Dog and the Red Wagon combined, so that either Dog or Jane was out of control, and racing away from Peter down a hill. “STOP!” shouted Peter. “STOP!” shouted Jane. Honestly, it was thrilling. Ten minutes’ reading practice with the teacher, every day a cliffhanger. I’m not sure if it came before or after Ant and Bee, with their zany personalities and surreal scrapes. As an adult I found out both sets of books are seen as famously uninteresting and an insult to intelligent children. Who knew?
My favourite book growing up
The Narnia books, all of them. It was fashionable in the 70s for the cool and liberal to despise their heavy-handed Christian message, but I wouldn’t have known a Jesus metaphor from a lion coming back to life again, and they were as transporting as books can be. One of the hardest sorrows of my childhood was that I could never really step into Narnia as the Pevensie children step into the salty painted waves and swim to the Dawn Treader.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving is the first book I remember reading with a writer’s eye. I sensed craft, and struggled to deconstruct it. The process was new and changed me as a reader.
The writer who changed my mind
In my teens and 20s I was something of a literature snob, also a feminist and mostly humourless. Jilly Cooper’s early novels looked like brash little morsels with girls’ names for titles, and were beneath contempt. Imagine my confusion to discover that light books take as much skill as heavy ones. I reject the term “guilty pleasure” as firmly as I reject her sexual politics.
The book I came back to
I had been stuck in War and Peace at Anna Pavlovna’s damned soiree with the little Princess Bolkonskaya and her faint moustache for about 18 years, so when faced with a regular commute on the North Circular London ring road I broke my block with chapters on audio, and the paper book between times. It ended with a blissful last 200 pages by the fire one Christmas. I loved it. It’s off my conscience.
The book I could never read again
I read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy at about 45. Youthful hope endangered, progress grinding mystery to dust, those wide horizons … I should have read it when I was younger. It moved me but not enough, and in an older, muted way. The Road came at the right time for me, which is sad.
The book I am currently reading
The Inheritors by William Golding. The writing is poetic but simple and the language limited, and yet it presents an entirely unfamiliar vision, and is therefore unsettling and complicated to absorb.
My comfort reads
In adulthood I reread very little – I fear to return. Nevertheless, there are books that, once picked up, make you carry on. I Capture the Castle is one, Cold Comfort Farm another. A Moveable Feast, The Great Gatsby … All reliable joy, all comforting, if only for their brilliance.
• Amy & Lan by Sadie Jones is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
