Contrary to the title, this book was a very good beginning to a world of literature for me. At the time – Year Six, when I was ten – I absolutely hated reading and would never dare to do so in my spare time. However, the teachers decided to let me access the ‘free reading’ shelf in the library (with the coveted white stickers!) and the first book I picked up was this. Naturally at the time I was having my ‘goth/emo’ phase, and this cover instantly appealed to me. I gobbled up the entire series over breaks and lunches and bedtimes, and from then on I was an avid reader. These books taught me that reading didn’t have to be boring, nor did it have to be an academic thing – it was something I could enjoy. This book also led me to start writing my own stories which were initially very similar to Snicket’s (to the point of plagiarism!)
Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002)
Anyone who knows me well will know of my complete and utter obsession with Coraline. And that’s absolutely what it was: an obsession. I totally fell in love with Gaiman’s novel. I read it in a day and re-read it countless times. I loved Coraline and wanted to be her. When the movie came out, I started dressing like Coraline. I had another copy of Coraline, as well as the graphic novel. Additionally, I was transfixed by the artwork. Whenever I stumbled across one of the terrifying full-page illustrations whilst reading at primary school, I’d linger on it in the hopes a passerby would be impressed. Now that I’ve re-read it as a seventeen-year-old, I finally recognise the true creepiness and terror of Coraline. At the time, however, I had never felt frightened by it; merely endlessly entertained. When my family and I would stay in cottages over the holidays, I’d always go looking for hidden doors. I desperately wanted my own Coraline adventure. Not anymore, I don’t!
The Knife of Never Letting Go was my first taste of the rapidly growing world of YA dystopian fiction. It was a serious craze when I was in my pre-teens, but this was the book series I read before The Hunger Games and Divergent – Chaos Walking. I had been attracted to the cover design and the brief flickers of pages of layered fonts and words on certain pages (the Noise), and my parents and I spent a few nights at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2012 and I just couldn’t put this book down the entire time. I bought the rest of this series, as well as the rest of Ness’s YA books, soon after, and thoroughly enjoyed each one of them. This book is probably the source of all the violence in the stories in my early teen years!
Instruction Manual for Swallowing by Adam Marek (2007)
The first thing I ever heard about this collection of short stories was that it contained a story about robot wasps. I’d put off reading it for quite a while as I didn’t think I liked short stories. A lot of people seem to share this feelings – they can’t part from full-length novels. But this collection was really my gateway into short stories and flash fiction. These stories are bizarre, graphic and violent, with animals being measured by volume, people serving up flesh at zombie cafes and mothers giving birth to over thirty babies at once, to name a few. Naturally, these enormously appealed to me. They were great fun to read, as were the stories in Marek’s other collection, The Stone Thrower, and again significantly impacted my writing, as I was now much more open to the idea of writing short stories rather than full-length novels, and have been more favourable of this style ever since.
I almost never read this book. I got it for free as part of a Waterstones offer, and only got it because everything else looked rubbish. Nothing about it appealed to me – not the cover nor the blurb – and it was left, abandoned, on my shelf for a while. Finally, I gave it a a go, expecting very little, and was absolutely blown away. This tells the story of Austin, who is sexually attracted to both his girlfriend and best friend Robbie, is faced with the attack of gigantic flesh-eating praying mantises on his small, fictional town, and obsessed with retelling the stories of his Polish ancestors and recording his own history. It was like nothing I had ever read before and my favourite book for a good few years. I knew the first chapters by heart, and had penciled around so many of my favourite lines and dialogue. It’s fantastically funny and bizarre and gruesome, and whilst one of my English teachers loved it, the other gave me it back and deemed it ‘inappropriate’. Give it a shot.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1995)
Alas, we have reached the end: the book I am currently reading. Murakami is my favourite author currently – you might’ve seen my The Elephant Vanishes review – and although I own nine of his books so far, I plan on collecting his entire bibliography. Murakami’s style has been incredibly influential on my own, and I’d argue it’s very much visible in my own short stories. I’ve been discovering a range of Japanese authors lately, such as Banana Yoshimoto and Nao-Cola Yamazaki, but Murakami has proved to be one of my greatest loves. His writing is absolutely addictive and also always makes me want to eat spaghetti. He talks about spaghetti a lot.
Whilst there are many more books I could talk about, these six are sort of the benchmarks for difference periods of literature and writing for me.
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