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My earliest reading memory
At a secondhand book sale at school, a kind teacher recommended my mum buy Brian Jacques’s Redwall. Noble monastic mice battle thuggish rats: catnip for a seven-year-old.
My favourite book growing up
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The mad robots and two-headed aliens are great for the teenage brain, but beneath all that is the sadness, and the questions about why life has to be like this, all filtered through poor Arthur Dent. I sometimes pull it off the shelf to read half a page, just to remind myself how comedy writing is done.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I tried One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a bit young, was baffled and thrown back by it, and then had another go, and couldn’t believe how bracing Ken Kesey’s writing was. It’s pure psychedelia and probably hasn’t aged tremendously well, but in terms of the way you could write, it really freed my mind (man).
The writer who changed my mind
I was a full-on doomer about humanity’s future until last year, when I read statistician and climate scientist Hannah Ritchie’s excellent Not the End of the World. I’m now a fraction more optimistic, which makes me a fraction more fun at parties.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t remember not wanting to be one, which is obviously insufferable. But I didn’t seriously think about how to go about doing it until my mid-20s, when I read John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. It’s great sci-fi, but rooted in complex characters doing their best in an extraordinary situation, and it sparked the idea that became my first novel.
The book or author I came back to
I used to think Charles Dickens was very boring and stuffy, but the more I read him now, the more I think he’s the absolute nuts. Slightly embarrassingly, I welled up reading bits of Bleak House last year on a crowded commuter train. I had to pretend I had something in my eye.
The book I reread
I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice every few years for two decades now. I studied Austen at university, spent 10 years in a Jane Austen-themed improvised comedy group called Austentatious, and P&P only gets better. Just when you think you’ve got everything out of it, you find more jokes, more wisdom, more understanding. It’s stunning. Plus, everyone fancies Lizzie.
The book I could never read again
The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz. Such beautiful prose, and Trump’s ruined it for everyone now.
The book I discovered later in life
A few years ago I discovered the publisher Persephone, which specialises in mid-20th-century books, mostly by women. The pitch is that these authors are all undeservedly forgotten. I was given a subscription by some comedian friends several years ago and am now about 50 books in. They are comfort reading, but high-quality, like a wholemeal pizza. Actually, that sounds horrible.
The book I am currently reading
I’m regretfully coming to the end of Mick Herron’s Slough House series, which has been a perfect, very British, very depressing, very funny pick-me-up.
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My comfort read
Anything by PG Wodehouse. No matter how grim the path Bertie Wooster treads, no matter how strait the gate or charged with punishments the scroll, you know sunshine will eventually win the day.
