Favourite Reading
Here are a few writers I’m in awe of. Some of them I grew up with, others I’ve discovered more recently.
Diana Wynne Jones
Sitting down with one of her novels is like talking to your best and funniest friend. My memories of her books are clearer than a lot of stuff that really happened to me (apart from that time when I found some flying potion in my new chemistry set…) Favourites include: Eight Days of Luke, the Chrestomanci books, The Ogre Downstairs.
Susan Cooper
Especially the sequence ‘The Dark Is Rising’. Fantasy grounded in the real world, with an Arthurian undercurrent. Again, you feel like you know all the characters as friends (or bitter foes) and you care what happens to them. The imagination is up there with the very best, but more importantly every story stays in your heart. And they’re strangely scary. Especially Silver On The Tree, the last one. Great verses too. ‘On the day of the dead, when the year too dies…’
Robert Westall
The tough guy of children’s fiction. His heroes, at any rate, tend to be hard as nails. From Chas and Clogger in The Machine Gunners to biker John Webster in The Devil On The Road, none of them are afraid of a punch-up. Futuretrack Five is another of my favourites. Featuring yet another guy on a motorbike, funnily enough. Robert Westall is also very big on cats…
C. S. Lewis
J. R. R. Tolkien
I can’t say much about these two that hasn’t already been said. But yes, I am one of those people who reads The Lord of the Rings every few years. The films are great too, and I do think Tolkien might agree, just a little bit.
C. S. Lewis takes a lot of stick these days, but he just had a knack for telling stories – this wonderful authorial voice. Some people say it is a patronising voice, but I’ve never felt that. I like his ‘adult’ science fiction too, though it probably isn’t as good as his Narnia sequence.
Eva Ibbotson
You can tell her books are brilliant by the time you’re two lines in. The classic I remember most is ‘Which Witch?’ Especially for the three-headed Wizard Watcher that constantly bickers with itself. And her more recent books (E.g. To The River Sea) are better still. Funnily enough, we share the same agent – much in the same way that a racehorse might share her paddock with a llama.
Richard Adams
Watership Down. Who’d have guessed that a book about rabbits could be so dark and mythic. Keehar is clearly the best seagull in literature. I remember being totally freaked out by the film when I was little. I still find it rather disturbing.
John Christopher
He’s written some superb science fiction, including the Tripods trilogy (which people of my generation remember as a very good BBC series that was never finished). The Lotus Caves is a stand-out book – about two boys, living in a lunar colony, who find a cave inhabited by an intelligent plant.
John Wyndam
The Day of the Triffids, obviously. But also The Kraken Wakes and his short stories. My favourite short story of his is called Pillar to Post, and deals with what you might call ‘extreme time travel’. Not to give anything away, it turns into this mad tactical duel-to-the-death between two time travellers – who rather inconveniently are forced to share the same disabled body. Ingenious and gripping.
Terry Pratchett
Everyone knows who he is. But I’ll stick my neck out here and say that The Bromeliad (i.e. the Nome Trilogy) is one of the great children’s classics. It’s powerful, exciting, thought-provoking, and a thumping good read. Apart from being three of the funniest books ever written.
Stephen King
What’s the king of horror doing here? Well, I did read him rather too much at one time. But my absolute favourite is a book he wrote ‘for kids’ – specifically, for his then-teenage daughter Naomi. The Eyes Of The Dragon. It has everything: a great hero, a terrifying villain, fascinating characters in between, magic, horror, heroism, danger, mystery, heartbreak, suspense… agonising suspense… and a dragon. I’ve read The Eyes Of The Dragon so many times, I could practically recite it. A shame it’s not one of his more famous books.
Philip Pullman
Needs no introduction. How he came up with the amazing stuff in His Dark Materials is beyond me. Perhaps he is insane. Perhaps he’s from another dimension. His daemon must be a dolphin or something super-intelligent like that. He is one of those who nurses a strange hated of C. S. Lewis, that’s true, but then I suppose I’m not mad about celery. In a previous job I had to read Northern Lights at my desk. If there’s a better way to get paid, I’d like to know what it is.
