Across the Spectrum

Ever since I first learnt to read, I have read books from any genre, both fact and fiction, academic and non academic, funny and sad. I can’t keep to any single type of book and I would never want to.

When I first started reading I loved comics like Action, Victor, TV21 and, of course, The Beano. I used to lie in bed for ages reading by torchlight and I would read most of them over and over again. When I started to move onto books, I was buying books from Target’s Doctor Who range, Michael Bond’s Paddington books and the Narnia books. I also liked certain fact based books. For example, I had (and still have!) a Crazy but True fact book which I probably drove everyone mad with at the time constantly reading out random facts! Later on I was definitely interested in the unexplained, having a book of mysteries at sea and The Vampire in Legend, Fact and Art. Around the same time I would be found with my head in one of the Ladybird history books, something that I really enjoyed because they were proper pocket money books and I could buy at least one or two a month.

As with so many other things, secondary school severely dampened my enthusiasm for reading and in my teens I was much more likely to be listening to music or watching TV. After I left it took me two or three years to regain the reading habit, but when I did it was through reading the entire R F Delderfield novels that were available in the W H Smith across the road from my office. I read only his novels for about 6 months, going from To Serve Them All My Days, to A Horseman Riding By, to Diana, then The Avenue Saga, and finally the Swann Family Saga. The only other time I did anything similar was in Saudi where the library on the base had about twenty Terry Pratchett Discworld books and I read all of them, with just the odd Inspector, either Morse or Wexford thrown in!

I was a fitful book reader for a while during my twenties and thirties, going from reading voraciously to hardly reading at all depending upon how I felt and what was happening in my life. Then, I started commuting to London and I rediscovered books with a vengeance. Apart from a couple of years when I was writing my own stories, I was hardly ever seen without a book on the journeys to and from the capital. I started becoming very wide ranging in my tastes, going from autobiography to music history, from historical novels to social history novels, from crime novels to romance novels. I read anything and everything and I loved having the opportunity to explore new authors, new genres, new subjects and new stories.

I couldn’t imagine my life without a huge range of reading and, although I don’t read anything like as much as did on my commute, I still love the excitement of discovering a new author and the comfort of rereading an old one.