WHAT BOOK..?

SIMON MASON

. ..are you reading now?

THINKING, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is a wonderfully patient and frequently jaw-dropping explanation of why my brain is all over the place.

Mercian Hymns by Geoffrey Hill, too, which is a collection of wildly strange and funny prose poems about Offa, first king of England — a sort of cross between Edward the Confessor and Stalin.

...would you take to a desert island?

VANITY Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. A novel without a hero — but with just about everybody else.

‘A very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions,’ as Thackeray politely reminds his readers. But gorgeous.

...first gave you the reading bug?

THE Tales Of Brer Rabbit (pictured left). Born and bred in the briar patch, swaggering through the plantations of the Deep South, shooting the breeze with Brer Tarrypin, cocking a snook at Brer Fox and Brer Bear, getting caught and escaping again, stealing dinners, having the last laugh, quietly smoking his pipe. God, I loved that rabbit!

. ..left you cold?

AN OLD DIY guide I have. Written by sadists who seem to specialise in unclear explanations, lacking vital instructions, filled with what look like doctored pictures and the testimonies of ‘experts’, inappropriately calm, wrong, delusional and perhaps perverted.

I wasn’t so much cold as dangerously erratic. I opened my badly fitted patio doors and dropkicked the book into the garden.

Running girl by Simon Mason is published in paperback by David Fickling Books on Thursday, priced £7.99.