My earliest reading memoryThe first books I remember were from The Village with Three Corners series Sheila K McCullagh. I loved the – literally – colourful characters, like Johnny Yellow Hat. I was reading with my Grandma, in her garden perhaps, sitting on a small patio, surrounded by bright begonias and busy lizzies.
My favourite book growing upArnold Lobel’s wonderful Frog and Toad stories. Toad would get himself tied up in knots, trying to find a button or fly a kite, but Frog was always there – a constant, caring and funny friend. I enjoyed reading these stories to my own children when they were young, and we still sometimes go back and revisit them.
They’re so full of humour, heart and simple humanism. The book that changed me as a teenagerAt that time I loved Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Rosemary Sutcliff. But the book I remember having a really profound effect on me was Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.
I was passionate about biology, and the gene’s-eye view turned it upside down and suddenly evolution made sense. I went on to voraciously read all of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays on evolutionary biology. Those two authors really inspired me.
The writer who changed my mindWhen I picked up Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, I was already beginning to seriously doubt the Anglican faith I’d been brought up in. By the time I finished it, I knew I’d left that faith behind. Biological diversity could be entirely explained through natural processes; there was no need for – and no evidence of – a divine creator.
I became a humanist, although I didn’t know the word for it back then. The book that made me want to be a writerI never set out to be a writer. I wrote my first book as a handout to go with the first television series I wrote and presented on my own – Don’t Die Young on BBC Two.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
