Philip Pullman: ‘I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch’ | Philip Pullman

My earliest reading memory
I must have been read, probably by my mother, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and Kipling’s rhythms must have got into my memory, because I remember looking at the story How the Camel Got His Hump and experiencing the words gradually matching the sounds in my mind. I was six, and on board ship to join my father, an RAF officer stationed in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

My favourite book growing up
Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Three Twins, which was the sequel to his great Emil and the Detectives. It was only much later that I realised why that book had such a deep effect on me: like mine, Emil’s mother had been widowed, and he didn’t want her to marry again. I had no idea of the parallel then.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Outsider by Colin Wilson, of course, which made me stop wanting to be a pop star and start wanting to be an intellectual instead. It must have had that effect on hundreds of thousands of us. The majority recovered.

The writer who changed my mind
Frances Yates, whose Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition I read after my finals at Oxford, made me realise I’d got everything wrong, and should have studied occult Renaissance philosophy. But it was too late.

The book that made me want to be a writer
An anthology called The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. I found it in the school library, and it included Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The whole book blazed into my life like a comet.

The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married, and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised its majestic scope and depth.

The book I reread
Not so much a single book as all the poetry I know by heart, and all the poetry I don’t know by heart and want to. Poetry is everything.

The books I could never read again
Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: exactly the thing for an overheated teenager – exotic locations, grown-up sex, fancy stuff with words and images, a narrative framework involving Einstein’s theory of relativity, everything I was impressed by. I tried it later and found the mixture altogether too rich, but I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the love was real.

The book I discovered later in life
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s like coming across an entirely new colour.

The books I am currently reading
Chips Channon’s diaries; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series; Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus; Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh; Don Paterson’s new collection, The Arctic; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song; Mary Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva, etc, etc.

My comfort reads
Thrillers. Whodunits.

My earliest reading memory
I must have been read, probably by my mother, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and Kipling’s rhythms must have got into my memory, because I remember looking at the story How the Camel Got His Hump and experiencing the words gradually matching the sounds in my mind. I was six, and on board ship to join my father, an RAF officer stationed in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

My favourite book growing up
Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Three Twins, which was the sequel to his great Emil and the Detectives. It was only much later that I realised why that book had such a deep effect on me: like mine, Emil’s mother had been widowed, and he didn’t want her to marry again. I had no idea of the parallel then.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Outsider by Colin Wilson, of course, which made me stop wanting to be a pop star and start wanting to be an intellectual instead. It must have had that effect on hundreds of thousands of us. The majority recovered.

The writer who changed my mind
Frances Yates, whose Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition I read after my finals at Oxford, made me realise I’d got everything wrong, and should have studied occult Renaissance philosophy. But it was too late.

The book that made me want to be a writer
An anthology called The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. I found it in the school library, and it included Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The whole book blazed into my life like a comet.

The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married, and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised its majestic scope and depth.

The book I reread
Not so much a single book as all the poetry I know by heart, and all the poetry I don’t know by heart and want to. Poetry is everything.

The books I could never read again
Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: exactly the thing for an overheated teenager – exotic locations, grown-up sex, fancy stuff with words and images, a narrative framework involving Einstein’s theory of relativity, everything I was impressed by. I tried it later and found the mixture altogether too rich, but I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the love was real.

The book I discovered later in life
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s like coming across an entirely new colour.

The books I am currently reading
Chips Channon’s diaries; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series; Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus; Dick Davis’s translation of the Shahnameh; Don Paterson’s new collection, The Arctic; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song; Mary Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva, etc, etc.

My comfort reads
Thrillers. Whodunits.