Is it possible to gauge the influence our reading has on us over time?  Think back to the first books you ever read as a child – can you still remember them?  Have you read those same books as an adult and still found those same ideas and images grabbing you as they did that first time?

I can remember my mother reading The Wind in the Willows and The House at Pooh Corner to me when I was a very young child.  I can remember that sometimes I was bored, sometimes I couldn’t find my way through the complex language to the story inside.  But I always wanted to hear more, I always longed for the next chapter, begged her not to stop reading.  I can remember thinking, when I’m older I can read and read and read and never stop.  I can remember reading fairy stories from a  huge colourful book, to the poor guy who came to mend the boiler, when I was no more than 5 or 6.  I suppose I also loved having a captive audience!

I can remember being so inspired by the stories I read that I started writing my own stories – not usually more than a page long to begin with – and not usually very interesting.

The books that have shaped my life?  I loved Treasure Island, Jane Eyre, the Famous Five, the Lone Pine Five, all the usual books that kids in the 1960s read.  The Ann of Green Gables books by L M Montgomery are very special to me – because that was when I learned falling in love is not only about heart-pounding attraction, desperate emotional rollercoastering, but it can also be realising that your friend is the person you most want to keep in your life forever, without whom your life would be bleak and colourless.  The Wind in the Willows taught me that children’s stories don’t have to be facile.  Shakespeare’s plays taught me that I have a brain and I’m not afraid to use it.  Enid Blyton‘s books showed me that being nosy is a sure way to get into trouble and end up tied up in a cellar (but oh the adventure!).  Many, many books taught me to believe I could write,  Agatha Christie, Tom Holt, Jasper Fforde and Patricia Wentworth taught me what I wanted to write and that you don’t have to be highbrow or obscure to be a good writer.  Books made me take that leap of faith, try, experiment, and when things didn’t work out, I had somewhere to go to recover.  If all else fails, they make a bloody big pile you can hide behind.

But over all of this, the books themselves, crowding about me like friends, took over my life to the detriment of all else – apart from my family of course 🙂 and I can honestly say that nine times out of ten, I’d sooner spend my money on a book than a bar of chocolate – and those who know me know that is really saying something.