I don’t remember my parents reading me bedtime stories, although my mother once assured me she did. Neither of them read a great deal. My father had a poor education and restricted his reading to the newspaper and the occasional cowboy novella. My mother, when she had time and inclination, liked popular historical fiction like Catherine Cookson and Dickens. Once she converted to a Jehovah’s Witness, the Bible was added to the list.
My first memory of reading to myself (other than comics) was as an eight-year-old in late-60s Australia when the teacher handed out Storm Boy by Colin Thiele as the class book. I LOVED it. It’s about a boy who lives with his father, Hide-Away Tom, in a shack on the beach. The book contains themes of loneliness, family relationships, animal welfare, grief, injustice and race—all in just 50 pages.
Storm Boy adopts three orphaned pelican chicks and befriends an Aboriginal man called Fingerbone Bill. This was my introduction to the indigenous people of that country. Thankfully, at that point I was not aware of the appalling and continuing prejudice, bigotry, displacement and exclusion on top of the atrocious history of slaughter visited on those people. Fingerbone “knew more about things than anyone Storm Boy had ever known…He knew all the signs of wind and weather in the clouds and the sea. And he could read all the strange writing on the sand hills and beaches—the scribbly stories made by beetles and mice and bandicoots and anteaters and crabs and birds’ toes and mysterious sliding bellies in the night. Before long Storm Boy had learnt enough to fill a hundred books”.
Soon after we first got the internet in 2002 and I discovered you could buy just about any book second-hand online, I searched out and found a copy of Storm Boy. I cried when I read it again. Whether my reaction was due to the story itself or the association with my childhood, I couldn’t tell you, but I still think it’s a brilliant story.
After reading Storm Boy, I joined the public library and stretched my reading abilities to The Borrowers, which if you haven’t heard of it from the book series or screen adaptations, is about a family of miniature people who live secretly in the walls and beneath the floors of a house and “borrow” from the “human beans” (big people) to survive. I loved to think of these tiny folk hiding behind the skirting boards – I’d had a distant imaginary friend, My Friend Gorilla, who was always just out of view in the near distance. Once again, I was entranced by the fictional world and my future as an avid reader was assured.
Back in England, my early teens were dominated by animals: joining WWF and The Crusade Against Cruelty to Animals; reading animal magazines and the Adventure books by Willard Price. I must have read at least eight of the eleven titles available at the time, which were about the adventures of two teenage boys as they travel the world capturing exotic and dangerous animals, which their father sold to zoos, circuses and safari parks. In my naivety, I had yet to learn how cruel these places were.
Next came my introduction to fantasy through the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. These I thoroughly enjoyed whilst completely ignorant of the religious allegory that suffused them. You would think my mother’s attempts to indoctrinate me with her beliefs would have made the symbolism obvious, but I still struggle to this day to perceive “deep inner meaning” in literature.
In my mid-teens, darker territory followed with a few of Dennis Wheatley’s occult thrillers, such as The Devil Rides Out, which provided a tingle of soft horror and the introduction of a valiant adult protagonist who could defeat the forces of evil. This theme continued in the sword and sorcery heroic fantasies of Michael Moorcock, my ‘gateway’ to high fantasy.
BUT THEN! When I was 16 years of age, an older cousin recommended The Lord of the Rings. This was the first book since Storm Boy to have a lasting effect on me. Since that first time I have reread it at least once a decade, but I’m not sure I will again now. I hesitate to say it was one of the greatest fantasy books ever written since so much fantasy was written before and has been written since, and amongst the mountains of dross, there are indeed many great works, but I would say LOTR was hugely influential and had a lasting effect on the literary world.
In addition to Storm Boy and LOTR, there is only one other book that I have read more than once (that I can remember…), which I also came across aged 16. I’m talking about Dune by Frank Herbert, which is finally getting the big screen treatment it deserves in the latest film trilogy. This book blew me away and led me into a mostly unsatisfactory exploration of the science fiction genre. It remains the best sci-fi book I have ever read, and I am quite sure I will read it at least once more at some point. In my eagerness to delve into Dune’s world, I somehow missed the contents list at the front of the book, which included a listing for the appendices and glossary at the back. Consequently, I had to guess at some words from their context. It didn’t spoil the book for me though.
I think an insight into my adult reading will have to be covered some other time, there are so many genres and authors I could mention, but I will leave you with the title of the most memorable book of my student years: Gormenghast.
Geoff King 
Ah, I loved the Borrowers too! Thanks for the reminder.