Come the junior school years I could be found most lunch times in the library. The smell of the books and a landscape of possibilities lay before me, anything was possible. The Faraway Tree series by Enid Blyton were my first borrowings in year four. Who wouldn’t be charmed by a character named Kollamoolitumarellipawkyrollo better known as Mr Whatshisname? Modern reprints have changed some of the young characters names, Fanny to Frannie and Dick to Rick, due to sexual connotations. Is this an opportunity to explain to children that times change and what was once a proper and good name is now considered unacceptable? In any case, that a whole new generation get to read these books can only be a good thing, name changes notwithstanding.

I feel so lucky that our senior high school fiction books were two hero journeys: Great Expectations and My Brother Jack. I have read both many, many times. I guess this is where my love for historical fiction started. I cannot help but pick up a book with an historical cover whether it’s ancient Rome, Tudor England or World War 2. And books set in two time frames or two continents are double the enjoyment.

I read my first grown-up book was when I was 15. It was Taylor Caldwell’s Dear and Glorious Physician, a fictional story of Luke the author of the 3rd Gospel in the Bible. It was such a good read and a great introduction into adult fiction. I loved the story and I loved the writing.  I don’t dare read it again after all these years for fear of disappointment. Of course at the time it wasn’t classed as Christian fiction it was simply a best seller that my grandmother had bought and sat on the shelf until I found it one bored school holidays. And it set me on a path of reading more than just Seventeen magazines.

I love contemporary fiction where talented writers take me on adventures and show me lives so very different to my own. And I love the towns and places we’re taken to in books. So many of my travels have been to where a book is set and to simply drink in the atmosphere of place and time. What a delight to read all of Dan Brown’s books to realise I’ve been to every setting from Washington DC to Rome and Istanbul. To be able to say yes I know what’s around that corner, yes that door, go through it!

My mother was an avid reader.

In my early teens I can recall her reading The Sun is My Undoing by Marguerite Steen. She couldn’t put it down and I couldn’t understand what the big attraction was in such a huge novel: all those pages, all that tiny print!

My mother was a writer: poems, short stories, and a memoir. Her work has been published in a few compilations of poetry and won a Department of Veteran’s Affairs writing competition to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War 2. It was great to see her go forward at the ceremony to collect her award but it counted for little compared to her High Achievement certificate from completing Year 12 English in her late seventies. Her favourite author was Salmon Rushdie and she swooned over The Moor’s Last Sigh. His writing never appealed to me all that much until I read Shalimar the Clown and The Golden House, only then could I understand her devotion.

In her later years we used to play a game, it goes like this: We would round up a pile of books from the library and read the first page, then share what we thought of the opening paragraph and first page, and would we want to keep reading, why or why not. This opened up a huge range of conversations and we found we had a lot of common ideas and views on what makes for a great read. One session we were unanimous in our decision that Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton had the best first page along with Thomas Keneally’s book A River Town. Years after reading novels was beyond my mother’s health we would often reminisce about all those first pages.