Confessions Of A Reader

Publishing this week in the newspapers a list of ten novels writers believe children should read before leaving school I couldn't help thinking this is not the way to encourage reading amongst young people. Had I been told to read Shakespeare at 15 I am sure I would have loathed it ever after.

I never read a book till I was 14 and then never stopped.Everything the teachers touched turned to dust and I was a rebel without a pause. Thank goodness I wasn't forcefed the classics. I was ordered to the public library by my mother however and told to come back with two books.One was a cop out -a coffee table book of the Monkees(it was 1967) but the other was a 'real'book, something called James Bond 5 and a half about a geeky boy who would climb out of his bedroom in the evening and have adventures solving crime.I was hooked.Couldn't stop me then.I ate books.Detectives first, Agatha Christie - Ten Little Niggers (sorry!),then Horror and Ghost books,Arthur Hailey blockbusters,Airport and Hotel,Wheels,and then somehow I came across Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tifanny and the Grass Harp.Strange, but entrancing.Iris Murdoch's Brunos Dream was like entering the weirdest world,totally mystifying yet somehow familiar.I was never the same again after reading Murdoch...

Then it was Dickens and Shakespeare,Wilde,Orwell,Kafka,Proust,Huysmans (am I boring you already?)Gide Sartre,Camus,Tolstoy,Turgeniev,Checkhov,I was mad in my devouring. I went through distinct phases.There was my Hemingway period,Fitzgerald,Dostoyevsky ad nauseam.An obbsessive compulsive streak made me have to read the oeuvre.

There is nothing like reading books to make you a totally useless human being.'Why don't you do something practical' I would be urged by parents now, (perhaps regretting setting me on such a non productive Odyssey) 'read a manual or something'. No use.The die was cast...