My earliest reading memory
I was reading – or pretending to read – before my brain could encode memories, so probably around three or four? I “read” Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, but that was mostly pictures.My favourite book growing up
Charlotte’s Web by EB White. For years, I remembered it as a story about a little girl named Fern who saved her pet pig, Wilbur, but it’s not. It’s a story about a writer named Charlotte, who happens to be a spider, who spins words into her web that save Wilbur from slaughter. It’s about the power of language to save lives. Looking back at the books I’ve written, I can see now that all of them are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web. It’s the perfect book.The book that changed me as a teenager
Teenagers change constantly, hour by hour, book by book. I read voraciously as a teenager because we didn’t have smartphones, and every book I read left its mark. The Catcher in the Rye certainly was one of them. I must have read it when I was 12 or 13 and learned two skills critical for my adolescent survival: a disaffected attitude and how to spot a phoney.The writer who changed my mind
Every writer I read changes my mind. Isn’t that the point of reading? But OK. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it in 1975 in Nepal, when I was 20, during a month-long trek in the Himalayas from Pokhara to the Tibetan border. That was 50 years ago, and there were very few trekkers back then. We had no GPS. I was trekking with my friend, following winding trails across the mountains, through forests of bright pink rhododendron. Sometimes we’d pass sherpa heading down to town. Their donkeys wore bells on their harnesses, and we could hear them echoing long after they’d passed. I didn’t know the term “magic realism” yet. I just knew that magic was real.The book that made me want to be a writer
