My earliest reading memory
A vivid fight-or-flight response to a joke in Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Ha Ha Bonk Book: “What’s green, lives in a field and has 4,000 legs? Grass – it was a mistake about the legs.” I remember staring blankly at the page trying to parse what on earth was happening, going through scandalised childish versions of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, until finally reaching awestruck acceptance. Unreliable narrators hit hard in formative years, I guess. The realisation that a writer could get away with treating a reader like that was completely outrageous.
My favourite book growing up
What follows is a cop-out answer, so I’ll try to couch it in self-awareness. I miss when reading felt like a dependably easy, inexhaustibly voracious kind of pleasure. For a long while my preference was to have something like three books “on the go”, which now strikes me as completely absurd. For this reason, it’s genuinely tricky to extricate a single book as being a “favourite”, purely because reading always involved a certain amount of contingent rubbernecking between genres. I will say I hit a memorably sweet spot when pivoting between the boric acid pessaries of James Herriot’s Vet in a Spin at home, Kate Atkinson’s tricksy Behind the Scenes at the Museum for the bus journey, and Small Gods by Terry Pratchett waiting in my school locker.
