WHATBOOK..? JOHN CONNOLLY

. ..ARE YOU READING NOW?

TOM BROMLEY’S Wired For Sound: Now That’s What I Call An 80s Music Childhood, as I host a show on RTE Radio in Ireland based around music from 1977 to 1989. Bromley’s a bit younger than I am, but our touchstones from that era are similar. I’m also reading The Eerie Silence by the astrobiologist Paul Davies, which argues for the expansion of the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. I’ve been working on a sci-fi novel and I find some of his ideas fascinating.

. ..WOULD YOU TAKE TO A DESERT ISLAND?

A COLLECTION of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster stories, assuming I could find an anthology big enough. I don’t think I could ever like someone who didn’t like Wodehouse, and the company of Bertie and Jeeves would greatly cheer me up.

. ..FIRST GAVE YOU THE READING BUG?

THE first book I ever read unassisted was an Enid Blyton Secret Seven novel. I remember breaking some longer words down into their constituent parts so that I could pronounce them phonetically. For years I thought ‘cupboard’ was pronounced ‘cup-board’. My mother must have thought she was raising Little Lord Fauntleroy. ‘Mater, shall I get some plates from the cup-board?’ We didn’t even have cupboards. In Ireland, they were called ‘presses’.

. ..LEFT YOU COLD

HARD TIMES by Charles Dickens. I love Dickens — Bleak House is the greatest novel in the English language, but Hard Times is a drudge. For some reason, it was the only Dickens novel on the Irish syllabus for many years, and hence put generations of schoolchildren off Dickens.

THE Wrath Of Angels, £17.99, and Books To Die For, co-edited by John Connolly, at £25, are published on August 30. John is appearing at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate today: Visit www.harrogateinternational-festivals.com/crime