My earliest reading memory
I’m six years old, up a tree, reading The Travels of Magnus Pole by Jonathan Wills. No one can reach me. The post-psychedelic aesthetic and oddness of 1970s children’s books still fills me with a nostalgic glow.
My favourite book growing up
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, about a city boy who runs away to the Catskills, sparked something inside, as did Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Both conveyed a message of independence, transgression and a reverence for the rural that’s stayed with me.
The book that changed me as a teenager
At 18 I carried England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage around all summer, while exploring every cranny of London. It became my guidebook, Bible, manifesto. With a headful of the Angry Brigade, the Slits, Rotten and co, a Travelcard and a bit of hash, I visited almost every punk-adjacent location that Savage imbues with cultural relevance.
The writer who changed my mind
By the age of nine I’d ingested everything by Judy Blume. This was in the north-east during the miners’ strike – quite a masculine climate – so I was laughed at, but I didn’t care, for in Judy’s work lay all the secrets of a mysterious faraway planet: females.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Hunger by Knut Hamsun turned my mind inside out in my early 20s. I’d read many novels about similarly impoverished, solipsistic half-mad young men – Fante, Genet – but Hunger was something else entirely: early European modernism. Hamsun said it was his attempt to describe “the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow”.
The book or author I came back to
I found the poetry of Thomas Hardy to be dismal and the prose of DH Lawrence to be overwrought – all those exclamation marks. Expressing this was probably the reason I failed A-level English. But I now recognise both as visionaries who saw far beyond the England they occupied. I particularly admire Lawrence’s novellas, The Fox and The Virgin and the Gypsy.
The book I reread
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, because it’s near-perfect, and Ask Dr Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller because it contains dirt, humour and wisdom.
The book I could never read again
I read the masterful Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn twice. Then I was asked to write a new foreword but had to construct it from memory. It’s the best British true crime account, but I couldn’t step into the world of Fred and Rose West a third time. There’s also a Booker-longlisted title that was so bad I still get angry when I think about it. Writerly loyalty forbids me from naming it.
The book I discovered later in life
Not being a fan of fantasy, I had never read Alan Garner until I was in my 30s – Thursbitch was the first. I knew so little about Garner that I once thought I was talking to him at a literary ceremony, but the guy turned out to be a dentist. He still signed my book though.
The book I am currently reading
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan is a reminder that brevity is perhaps the most valuable currency in literature right now; she chisels the life of a horse trainer down into prose that’s succinct, beautiful and absolute, like a diamond.
My comfort read
Whenever I am overcome with existential dread I, like many others, reach for the PG Wodehouse – currently about thrice daily. I only have to think of the title Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and I laugh. Or Viz comic, which is the vocabulary of my childhood.
• Cuddy by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury on 16 March. An adaptation of The Gallows Pole is forthcoming on the BBC. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
