WHAT BOOK?

. . . are you reading now?

DESERT Victory, published by the Imperial War Museum and edited by Julian Thompson, is a collection of first-person accounts from multiple viewpoints, on all sides, of the North Africa conflict of 1941-1943.

An odd choice, but I’m in writing mode at present, so I tend to favour ‘dipping’ books, as anything with a narrative requires a headspace I am not at liberty to provide.

The accounts are verbatim, so have an immediacy and sense of rawness that the best fiction often does not provide. Every paragraph of text is a small sonnet to the confusion, terror, hardship, boredom, loss and absurdity of conflict — something we would all do well to consider.

. . . would you take to a desert island?

I RARELY read books more than once, so would have to choose from a small selection that I read on a regular basis.

In this list would be The Diary Of A Nobody (George and Weedon Grossmith), Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson), West With The Night (Beryl Markham), Fate Is The Hunter (Ernest K Gann), Tiger! Tiger! (Alfred Bester) and True Grit by Charles Portis.

I kept the best for last, and that would be it: Portis’ opus is an extraordinarily mesmerising tale, set in Arkansas in 1878. The protagonist is 14-year-old Mattie Ross, and her single-minded resolve is hugely inspiring: that when things are at their very worst, it is how you react that is the measure of your character, and those that assist you and respect this become not just friends, but soulmates, bonded for life in the heat of endeavour.

Many people know it from the Coen brothers’ 2010 movie with Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges, and the film does the book justice — a great rarity.

. . . first gave you the reading bug?

THE first 30 or so of the books we read are not by our choice — Ladybird Book 1B for my generation and Roger Red-Hat for my children’s. But the wonderful reading adventure only really begins when you choose a book to read of your own.

You’re at the starting gate of the fiction adventure, and the flag has dropped. When this happened to me, I headed to the bookcase at home. Dad was an economist, and although ‘ The Federal Reserve System 1945-49’ probably has a lot going for it, I opted for the only book I could find with illustrations and dialogue: Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

I set to reading it and, when I had finished, read it again. The delight for me was that I got it. The odd humour, the circuitous narrative, the sense that here was a new world, a different world, but one that was real, and unique, and beautiful. The Cheshire Cat has never really left me.

. . .left you cold?

THE Catcher In The Rye. I read it way too late, when I was 27, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

If I’d read it when I was 17 years old and a self-absorbed teenager, I probably would have got it.

ReD Side Story by Jasper Fforde (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is out now.