Today I am going to have a go at the 'The Books Of My Life' feature in 'The Guardian': https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-books-of-my-life I accept it is arrogance to think that anyone might consider me a 'leading author'. Back in 2010, though I had written novels over the preceding 22 years, I had none on sale. Self-publishing and then being taken up by Sea Lion Press https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/ enabled me to get my books out there and in turn it really fuelled my writing. I have now written 70 books, most of which are now on sale in e-book format. I might not be a best seller, 2014 was my peak year of sales and as with the marketplace in general there has been a decline since then. It is often said that everybody has at least one book in them, but clearly I have had a lot more than that and I have no idea how many more I will produce before I die. Thus, while I may not be renowned author and certainly am not 'leading', I feel it is reasonably legitimate for me to respond to the sort of questions that might be asked of such people.
Alexander Rooksmoor: 'Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed'
My earliest reading memory
I did not learn to read before going to school aged 4 years and 11 months. We had lots of books at home, but I tended to treat them in a visual way, looking at the images rather than the words. I understood the power of the printed word because my parents read so much. Apparently, aged 3, loath to attend playschool picked up a magazine (probably a Sunday supplement) and waved it at my parents insisting that it said that parents should not send their sons to play school. Thus, it was almost like a magic talisman rather than something to engage with myself. In terms of books, like most children of my generation in England, we started with the Peter & Jane books published by Ladybird. I remember the images of the book '1a. Play with Us' (1964 edition) better than I remember the words. I was a very slow reader and like many children of my generation sub-vocalised everything because we read aloud so much.
My favourite book growing up
The first fiction book I remember actually expressing a like for was 'The Grey Apple Tree' (1965) by Vera Cumberlege. However, the books I came back to most regularly was series by R.J. Unstead about British history. These were published in the early 1970s and I remember us working to collect them all (in the age before online book ordering!). They ran from 'Invaded Island' (1971) from Stone Age to 1066; 'Kings, Barons and Serfs' (1971), 1066-1300; 'Years of the Sword' (1972), 1300-1485; 'Struggle for Power' (1972), 1485-1689; 'Emerging Empire' (1972), 1689-1763; 'Freedom and Revolution' (1972), 1763-1815; 'Age of Machines', (1974), 1815-1901 and 'Incredible Century' (1974), 1901-1970. Some Saturdays I would go through them all before I got out of bed. They were highly illustrated A4 sized hardbacks which could be found in most school and public libraries but as a history fan, I had my own set. I note that their subtitle is 'A Pictorial History' and I realise now, I did simply look at the pictures rather than read the text.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I remember that in the larger library in the nearest town, they had a children's section and then around the other side of a row of shelves was a single set of shelves for 'older children'. It actually was at the start of the 'adult' bit of the library and I think the librarians had designed it to tempt teenagers to move from the picture and project books and indeed the 'Doctor Who' novelisations on to something a bit more mature. A lot of the books there were kind of 'kitchen sink' books for teenagers. I first cycled alone to this library (2.5 miles away) aged 11, which these days would probably terrify parents. I was very conscious of not going into age inappropriate areas (I was never someone who would sneak into movies older than for myself or try to drink alcohol underage). I remember one day hesitantly going round the corner to this section and borrowing the novelisation of 'Bugsy Malone' (1976?) not the script or graphic novel that are dominant now. I was struck by the fact it had one chapter that last less than a single page. I also remember a book of eyewitness accounts of various events, including the sinking of the 'Titanic'.
It was the next step which came quicker than I had long realised which really changed me. I discovered the science fiction and fantasy fiction section of the library. I borrowed both 'The Colour of Magic' (1983) and 'The Final Programme' (1968). While I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Final Programme' was the first book I had sat up through the night to complete. I had probably been attracted to it by the pop art/graphic novel book cover, but went on to read a lot of Michael Moorcock books in my life (and indeed all of Pratchett's work). For some reason my sixth form college library had the complete works of Moorcock as they were in the mid-1980s. I do not think the current librarian had ever explored the themes, i.e. lots of drugs and sex, that featured in many. I remember, aged 14 checking with my mother whether I should even be reading 'The Final Programme' given it mentioned sex on the cover, but she felt I was mature enough and ultimately it was more about needle guns and hallucinogenic security systems. What I think I learnt from Moorcock was that science fiction need not be all about big spaceships and robots. Furthermore, I went from 'The Final Programme' to 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971) which really sparked my interest in alternate history. My third novel, 'His Majesty's Dictator', which I completed in 1991, was heavily influenced by it.
The book that changed my mind
I have never really read a book that has altered my opinion on big issues. Maybe that reflects a dogmatism on my part. Friends use to often recommend me books that I 'must' read though it later turned out one was just getting rid of books he thought were terrible and wanted disposed of had misunderstood what lending a book to someone usually entailed. A couple of friends insisted I read 'The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story' (1984) by Richard Bach which I found tedious and fatuous. It was very arrogant in believing his story needed that kind of output. I see now that it was along these lines of annoyance that in 2009 I came to 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth. I had bought it assuming it was a straightforward fantasy novel. However, it became clear it was simply a vanity project to show off how much cleverer than the reader Barth knows he is. He even says openly that some readers will not 'get' what he is writing as if that is our problem rather than his.
While I had realised that 'in jokes' rarely work and had sought to remove anything that people might not get because it was too personal to me or my culture, Barth made me realise that any author who does not work with the reader is actually failing. We should both not pander to them but also we should not treat them with disdain simply because they cannot crack our own personal code. It also made clear to me that the books that get published are not necessarily 'good' books, they can simply be out one sale because the author has been fortunate and/or has contacts. I was alert from then on of books which were primarily the author parading their 'greatness' when in fact what they tend to produce in such circumstances is the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes. I would put 'Auto da Fé' (1935) by Elias Canetti which I read in 2000, in this category too.
The book that made me want to be a writer
There was no book which did this. Creative writing was an assessed part of the English curriculum from age 5-16, though I got 'let off' early as I sat my English Language 'O' Level a year early, aged 15. Thus, creative writing was something we did almost weekly. We were all writers. As a consequence I was not conscious of being 'a writer' probably until about 2012, some 24 years after I had completed writing my first novel. I guess I had never really registered that other people did not write in their spare time too.
I knew I got good marks for my creative writing and recall two of my stories being put up on the wall when I was in 3rd Year of primary school. One of them was called 'Wings for a Day' and apparently the teacher noted my knowledge (aged 7) of world events as I featured the fall of the Colonels junta in Greece writing 'in Greece there was a war' and mention of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (the Yom Kippur War had been the preceding year and my parents had an illustrated book about it), though unaware of the politics, rather than the simple news coverage of violence. As the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' team were shown in one of their spin-off books, as children we were obsessed by Moshe Dayan's eyepatch.
While I got good grades for my creative writing, this actually misled me because teachers would focus in their feedback (not called that back then) on my imagination and not the fact that I was screwing up a lot of the punctuation. This seems to have stemmed largely from my 3rd Year Middle School (nowadays Year 6) teacher, Mrs. Simmons, who had a real aversion to pupils using direct speech and would insist we stuck to reported speech. It was only as an adult that I realised I had been punctuating direct speech wrongly. If I had been a poorer writer, I would have been alerted to this sooner. If I had actually looked at what I had been reading then maybe I would have noticed I was not doing it the same way, though, of course, we tended to see what was done in books was not what we were doing in English at school. Many/most of us believed all poetry had to rhyme.
The book I came back to
In fact there are two, though both on a similar theme. 'Great Escape Stories' (1977) by Eric Williams and 'Colditz' (1974), the anthology version combining 'The Colditz Story' (1952) and 'The Latter Days' (1953) by P.R. Reid. I abandoned the Williams book as from daring stories of Second World War escapes by PoWs, it moved into civilians and then the Korean War. While I found the early stories, of the twelve, 'cosy' if it is legitimate to say that - and was especially impressed by the account of Airey Neave escaping Colditz dressed as a German officer - the later ones were much more unsettling. In the 1970s there were lots of people still around who had been adults during the Second World War. There were a lot of books like 'I am David' (1963) by Anne Holm which was read to us and a copy of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1947) was in our classroom when in what is now Year 6, not just the school library. You could watch 'Carrie's War' (the 1974 series of the 1973 book by Nina Bawden) after school and 'The World at War' (first broadcast in 1973) on Sunday afternoons so the Second World War was pretty much 'currency' for us much more than the 1950s or 1960s. The headmaster of my school later chided me for abandoning the book but even then, fearful of nightmares, I did not return to until I was an adult, still very certain about my aversion to torture, but having seen and read a lot more.
It is difficult now to remember why I felt so drawn to escape stories at the time, it is not something that seems to have continued after I went to secondary school. I abandoned 'Colditz' because I foolishly looked ahead while reading it on holiday in 1978 and finding that Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair (1918-1944) nicknamed the 'Red Fox' was killed on his final escape attempt in 1944. His repeated escapes made him a hero of mine and I had been using the codename 'Red Fox' in various secret clubs we tended to form as adolescents. It was chilling to read he had been killed and not, like Neave, got clear away. I lost all heart in reading the book and only came back to it and also read 'Colditz: The German Story' (1961) by Reinhold Eggers, as an adult in the late 1990s.
The book I could never read again
Aside from 'Chimera' and 'Auto da Fé' I have already mentioned I would add 'The Quincunx' (1989) by Charles Palliser. I had come across the term 'quincunx' when studying Latin (at a non-selective, comprehensive school - it did happen back then and I did want to be a professional historian) at school, meaning a pattern of five-twelfths (though to me it looked like five-ninths) and a design for the layout of trees in a garden (I was later into garden history), so I thought it would be a story about a sort of code perhaps concealed in a garden and to some extent the synopsis sustained that misapprehension. What it is instead is an unrelenting account of a boy and his mother who are tricked out of their relatively meagre middle class wealth in early 19th Century England. They then proceed to be subjected to all the worst privations of the era. The mother, Mary, having lost her house and all her savings due to a scam, after living as a squatter in an abandoned East London building ends up as a prostitute tied to a brothel. The boy, John, in turn is abused at a horrendous school where he has to literally fight for his food, in a mental asylum and as a scavenger in London sewers. Yes, we know that life was bleak and people were abused but the contorted path the two protagonists are taken along so that they can suffer as many different kinds of abuse as possible is perverse, almost ridiculous.
In second place in this category I would add, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' (1988 edition) ed. by Boris Ford. Why they bothered to assemble 23 writers to comment on an era of writing that all of them appear to believe was much lesser in so many ways to what preceded, I have no idea. It was a real waste of time for them as well as the reader.
The book I discovered later in life
I am now 57 and am constantly discovering books. I imagine this question is about one which I may have read earlier in my life but only came to far later than that. I would point to 'Renaissance Europe 1480-1520' (1971) by J.R. Hale. I have read a lot of 'survey' books of European history but among them Hale's book really stands out. See my review here: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/09/books-i-read-in-september.html Hale really is command of the information he has and writes in such an engaging way for a non-fiction historical book. A lot of historians could learn from his approach. I bought this book in the late 1980s but it was over 30 years before I got round to reading it and I wished I had turned to it much sooner rather than leaving it in storage.
The book I am currently reading
'The Sussex Downs Murder' (1936) by John Bude [Ernest Elmore], the third of his novels I have read in the British Library Crime Classics series republication of his books.
My comfort read
While, as back in 2010, I still have a lot of affection for 'The Book of Heroic Failures' (1979) by Stephen Pile, the default book I turn to these days is the 'The Penguin Atlas of World History. Volume 2: From the French Revolution to the Present' (1964/2004). Doing this exercise has rather revealed that I am not really a reader at heart, I am more a looker at books so I guess this is why a book of lots of colourful maps is comforting to me.
