Reports of the demise of books much exaggerated

What a wonderful problem to have – books are piling up on the wee table beside my bed, waiting to be read, while others, written by friends and recently published, are due to arrive soon.

I often feel intimidated by people who imagine, quite justifiably, that I might be well read. You’d think that as a writer I’d have all the classics filed away in my memory banks, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

I read all the time, but I do it slowly, for a few precious minutes in bed, before I take Lady Dog for her morning walk.

If a book is really gripping me, I will stay awake at night to read it, but more often my sleepy brain is too addled to absorb literature of any kind.

Instead I grab a Guardian Weekend magazine and read of restaurants, pop-psychology, fashion and modern culture, reconnecting in some way with the London life I left behind in 1989.

There is nothing that compares to the feeling of being engaged in a good book: the excitement of returning to a unique fictional world.

While I’m passionate about film, the book is invariably better than the movie (with the notable exception of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a good book turned into a masterpiece on screen.)

When I first encountered my teacher and friend Iris Leal in 1986, she asked what I was reading and screamed with horror when I spoke the words “Stephen King”.

She demanded I read the great Russian writers and Thomas Mann and a host of others. She bought me a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which opened my eyes to magic realism, and then she ordered me to read Anna Karenina.

What Iris didn’t realise was that her well-intentioned exhortations were serving only to reinforce dark feelings of inadequacy that were pummelled into me at Public school. It was there, in my teens, that I decided the great works of literature were beyond me.

When you’ve been told you’re thick often enough, you start to believe it, but nothing was going to rob me of the joy of reading.

Devouring Enid Blyton’s stories in the 1960s, read by torchlight under the bedcovers after lights out, I was hooked. Having consumed every word of every book in her Secret Seven series, l moved on to the Famous Five, then the thrilling leap to Alan Garner’s magical adventures in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Elidor.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.