Childhood
In books it was Willard Price again. I didn’t realise there was any racism but you’re a bit blind to it at 10. Read every volume of a junior encyclopedia at that age as well. Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man.
Teens
Horror fiction – Squirm, the Rats, the Fog, passed around by us teens, with the pages including sex turned down (and there was a lot of it in James Herbert books). Pan horror anthologies. Stephen King books up to It. The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy. Animal Farm. All the All Creatures Great and Small novels.
Adulthood
Part of my university course was literature so read some excellent 20th century Russian and American literature – favourites were everything by Bulgakov (Master and Margarita is my fave book of all time), all John Irving’s books, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, the Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. In my first flatshare in London, someone recommended John Cowper Powys, which was 600 pages of dull (but I never give up books when I’ve started one).
Now
Read a lot of non-fiction now. But more recently read Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life and Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
Guilty Pleasure
Sven Hassel. Read all his novels and could answer questions on Mastermind about them. I even tried to join the Wehrmacht but they didn't have a 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment.Statistics: Posted by Johnny Anarchy — Wed Mar 02, 2011 4:34 pm
]]>