In an ongoing series, The Lumičre Reader asks a diverse range of writers and readers about the book that got them into books.

I CAN’T REMEMBER a time when I wasn’t into books. I would’ve been about three when I’d wheedle my cousin, Jamie, who was ten years older and good at voices, into reading I’ll Take You to Mrs Cole!, by Nigel Gray, over and over again. Mrs Cole was the lady down the road who looked after children. There were rumours that she chained up her charges in the basement, next to a tank of hungry piranha fish and fed them nothing but “curly kale.” The older kids at Mrs Cole’s listened to loud music that went “thump doo waddy waddy thump”. It was a horrific prison for naughty children. But, in true picture book fashion, our narrator found that Mrs Cole was in fact a plump, motherly woman who made “bacon butties” and called all the children “me lover”. I remember always feeling comforted and hungry at the end of that book, the first one that got me.

For the next ten years I was well-served by New Zealand writers; Dick Lasenby’s Harry Wakatipu books, Maurice Gee’s The Fat Man and The Half-Men of O series and an assortment of Margaret Mahy all went down a treat. But I was also something of an anglophile, fond of the mannered animals of A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Richard Adams. There were, too, the obligatory pony books of which I was immoderately fond. Having sampled the lot, I can safely say that Ruby Ferguson’s ‘Jill’ series is the best of its kind. However, by 13 this wholesome diet of fantasy, comedy and animal-based children’s fiction, was beginning to wear thin. There were only so many times I could re-read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (actually, I take that back; I’m still re-reading this book and getting a great deal of pleasure from it). I remember asking my father to recommend me an adult’s book. For reasons best known to himself, he gave me a slim paperback called The Wasp Factory. It looked approachable and sophisticated so I decided to try it. That night it was consumed in one sitting. Who knew that a narrator could be so unsavoury and bizarre? While this book is certainly no longer a favourite, I still have a definite soft spot for Iain Banks.

During my teenage years, similarly startling reads stand out – Lolita, all sorts of Ian McEwan, good old Jane Eyre, John Fowles’ The Magus and Margaret Atwood – but the next book to genuinely “get” me was Iris Murdoch’s The Sea the Sea. I wouldn’t put it past me to be impressed by this book simply because of its frequent and generous descriptions of the protagonist’s meals (they went something along the lines of “for lunch: tinned cherries, sardines, a piece of very strong cheddar and a glass or two of claret”). Its Englishness, humour and ruthless portrayal of the narrator, who seemed incapable of making the right decision in any situation, also appealed.

In the last five years I have been dependent on P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves Omnibus. Sadly it was too heavy to take in my backpack to Hanoi, where I stayed for six months with limited reading material. Fortunately the big bookshop in town had a small collection of English classics. I’ll never know if Anna Karenina and Middlemarch would have been so entertaining, had I read them in a different, less desert-like environment.

Last year, on a recommendation, I read the last book that really got me. Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red. There’s not a lot in the way of epic poetry written these days, so to discover a readable, beautiful, mind-bogglingly clever, novel-length poem about a red-winged monster called Geryon, and to love it more than most things I’d ever read before, was exciting.

Mentioning poetry, only now, at the end of my personal mini-history of reading, is a bit dispiriting. I’d always thought I liked poetry, from The Ancient Mariner to Carol-Ann Duffy, from Old Possum’s Practical Cats to Kate Camp. Evidently it didn’t get me like fiction did. I just hope it gets some people, as I’m currently attempting to write the stuff myself.