chivalry by neil gaiman and colleen doran

I suspect I was only there for the spontaneous human combustion, which really isn’t a terribly important part of the novel. It’s weird because I remember just how much I loved Blyton, and I’m somebody who loves going back to beloved children’s books, and yet whatever I loved isn’t there when I go back as an adult.Ĭharles Dickens’s Bleak House, a book I only came to in my late 40s.

I find it very hard to go back to Enid Blyton. I don’t know why I picked it up again, perhaps a year later, but I was surprised to find that it was now the most interesting book in the world. Gene Wolfe was an author I respected but didn’t love, and when I was 20 I struggled to read the first in The Book of the New Sun series, The Shadow of the Torturer. I loved that so much, and loved the idea of doing it too. Lewis wasn’t pretending to be invisible, he was very happily there in the text, making these lovely friendly asides to the reader. I don’t recall there being a time that I ever didn’t want to be a writer, but CS Lewis and his Narnia books definitely made me realise that these stories I loved were being written by a person. The book that made me want to be a writer I thought better to try and fail than not to try and let the time blow past. It plugged straight into everything I had ever thought or dreamed about becoming a writer and in that moment I was determined to become a writer. He wrote about wasting time, how you look around and time’s gone. It was Harlan Ellison’s fault, from his introduction to a short story called Count the Clock that Tells the Time, in a collection called Shatterday. It wasn’t until I was 22 that I realised I could stop dreaming of being a writer and instead be a writer. When I won the school English prize, I asked for The Return of the King as my prize book. I just had to find out how it ended, as my school only had the first two books. I was convinced it was not only the best book anybody had ever written but that it was the best book anybody ever would write. But if you had asked me at nine or 10 it was The Lord of the Rings. If you’d asked me at seven or eight it would have been the Narnia books, which I found infinitely re-readable – I wanted to live in them.

Gloriously morbid stuff for a three-year-old. I remember a children’s Hiawatha, a beautiful edition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin illustrated by Margaret Tarrant, and an illustrated Mikado – I’d learn the words of the songs without tunes: “Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block” and so on. I was three years old, we lived in Purbrook, near Portsmouth, and if I had been remarkably good my mother would order a book at the local bookshop and a month later we would go and pick it up.

Chivalry by neil gaiman and colleen doran