My earliest reading memory
A vivid fight-or-flight response to a joke in Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Ha Ha Bonk Book: “What’s green, lives in a field and has 4,000 legs? Grass – it was a mistake about the legs.” I remember staring blankly at the page trying to parse what on earth was happening, going through scandalised childish versions of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, until finally reaching awestruck acceptance. Unreliable narrators hit hard in formative years, I guess. The realisation that a writer could get away with treating a reader like that was completely outrageous.
My favourite book growing up
What follows is a cop-out answer, so I’ll try to couch it in self-awareness. I miss when reading felt like a dependably easy, inexhaustibly voracious kind of pleasure. For a long while my preference was to have something like three books “on the go”, which now strikes me as completely absurd. For this reason, it’s genuinely tricky to extricate a single book as being a “favourite”, purely because reading always involved a certain amount of contingent rubbernecking between genres. I will say I hit a memorably sweet spot when pivoting between the boric acid pessaries of James Herriot’s Vet in a Spin at home, Kate Atkinson’s tricksy Behind the Scenes at the Museum for the bus journey, and Small Gods by Terry Pratchett waiting in my school locker.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Sensing I should have outgrown the schlock of RL Stine’s Goosebumps series and having raced through the far more sophisticated Point Horror books and their sexy American campfire kind of dread, my request as a 13-year-old for a “creepy book” meant the school librarian slipped Susan Hill’s The Bird of Night into my hands. I had never read anything like it: a controlled psychological portrait of cruelty, devotion, and the terror of a mannered life. I truly think I trusted all people far less once I’d finished that novel, and loved them all more intensely.
The writer who changed my mind
I started an undergraduate degree in theology but after a year switched to English literature. There were many reasons for this change, most probably wrong-headed or to do with cowardice, but I do remember a glancing use of Gerard Manley Hopkins on a divinity faculty seminar handout, which hit me like a revelation. If I was going to spend time grappling with faith and doubt, I wanted more of that on the reading list.
The book I reread
I suspect I will read Ali Smith’s The Accidental until my eyes fall out (and then I will require recitations). Centring on a family forced to deal with a new presence in their lives, it’s been interesting to track how my sympathies for different characters shift as I grow older and nestle into new generational roles.
The book I could never read again
I foolishly thought any link between me and Ingela P Arrhenius’s Where’s Mr Duck? must end when my son reached a certain age, but alas, my 18-month-old daughter adores it. A final page features felt flaps over a mirror – “And where are YOU?” – so I am confronted by my drained, flagging resolve every time. Yet the day will come when she does not climb into my lap and extend its pages toward me, and that will be the worst day of my life.
My comfort read
Anything by Saki. You have time to read one of his short stories right now. Some are nasty little acts of mischief, some lugubriously camp fancies. There’s satire, folklore, sass and starch. Put this thing aside; go find some Saki.
• Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams is published by 4th Estate on 18 July. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
