My earliest reading memory
In London, reading my dad’s copy of the Times at four. It embarrassed my mum, who hurried me out of the room when visitors came.
My favourite book growing up
In Lagos, in my teens, I discovered Ibsen’s plays and Chekhov’s stories. I transplanted the characters, imagining them as Nigerian. That’s the magic of reading.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 11, at school in Nigeria, and read George Orwell’s Animal Farm at night instead of preparing for exams. Was there ever a more masterful little book to initiate a young soul into the nature of power? It was the first time a book broke my heart.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Plato’s Symposium turned me from science to literature. I took the questions it inspired on long walks. I went on to read early Tolstoy, Emerson, Charlotte Brontë and Whitman – disobeying my dad’s injunctions not to read his books. Then I began to write. I was 15. I had learned the first law of the writer’s spirit: to ask the right questions.
The writer who changed my mind
One day, in London, when I was 19, I read a book that began, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road …,” and I thought: “What is this?” Not long afterwards I read another book about people trying to get to a lighthouse. What was the difficulty? And that was how I changed from one kind of writer to another, and have been changing and questioning ever since.
The book I came back to
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – one for the expansion of a world and the other for the contraction of a world. When I was younger I didn’t know how one could read such long books. So I read Don Quixote every day on the underground as I went to work at the BBC to present a programme in the 80s. The book became the journey, and the journey the book.
The book I reread
It used to be Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I keep buying new editions purely to read it in different types. I still believe a new type almost makes a new book.
The book I could never read again
Advanced Level Physics by M Nelkon. As a scientist I was going to be an inventor of everyday wonders. I read equations the way you read a poem. But after Plato and Joyce I was never going to read Nelkon again. Instead I read Achebe and Maugham.
The book I discovered later in life
I recently met a professor of literature who claimed Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was the greatest novel in English literature. Determined to test this, I read and loved it. Is it the greatest English novel? I offer Great Expectations, Emma, Vanity Fair or Middlemarch. Meet me in a pub to discuss.
The book I am currently reading
Jane Austen’s Emma, also Ronald Berman’s The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas and Cornelia Homburg’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. The National Gallery exhibition was tremendous.
My comfort read
Pushkin’s short stories. A Pushkin story inspired Tolstoy to begin writing Anna Karenina. He is the model of how a poet should write prose. Most poets write prose like poetry. Pushkin, a great poet, respecting the laws of prose, writes his stories quietly, efficiently, and always with infallible charm.
• Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri will be published by Head of Zeus on 6 March. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
