The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

Both were a revelation in terms of how language could be used, how stories could be told – and what kinds of stories were worth telling. The book that made me want to be a writerĪs I entered my teen years, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I dove head-first into poetry and never looked back. But Prufrock changed all that: it was angsty love at first sight. Before that, poems were largely irrelevant to me, either comic limericks or formal sonnets. It was a thrilling revelation, and I ended up becoming passionately interested in the intersection of the Roman world and Christianity.Īlso, TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. I read it when I was 20, for a college course, and it completely changed the way I thought about the early days of Christianity, turning inside out much of what I’d been taught as a child.

The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, by Robert Wilken. The Fountainhead was my awakening about how crucial it is to read critically. If it was written in a book, I thought, it must be true. I saw authors as thoughtful and benevolent authorities. Before this I’d always read with an open heart. I realised that I hated the book – not the writing, but the ideas behind it.

But I began to feel a sort of visceral disgust – as if I were being submerged into a tub of slime. For maybe the first 50 pages, I was hooked by the story. And Ayn Rand’s doorstoppers were everywhere, so I picked one, and started reading. At 15, I often chose books based on how thick they were – the thicker the better. But one that stands out was actually a negative experience: reading The Fountainhead. I had so many positive formative reading experiences as a teenager.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley