According to Wikipedia, a bookworm is “any insect said to bore through books”, which is ironic since some books recently have bored me through.
Books were, when I was a boy, the means by which parents kept their children quietly occupied. Before games consoles, hundreds of TV channels and the internet existed I could be easily occupied for hours with a book or a stack of comics. A book engages your imagination in a way that passive consumption of film or TV cannot. It’s one of the reasons book lovers are so passionate about the conversion from page to screen: we all have our own deeply held vision of how characters and places look and sound.
I read so many books that by the age of 10 my school said I had the reading skills of a 16 year old. I’d found all the secret tunnels with the Famous Five, been one of Emile’s detectives, wandered around Narnia from beginning to end, knew Stig before he passed his driving test and followed Arne Saknussemm’s runes to the centre of the earth. There were only two that escaped me.
The first is quite obscure but was recommended to me by a primary school classmate. I looked for it in the library and in bookshops but with no success. In the 1970s it was hard to find books if you didn’t know the author, only the title. Eventually I gave up and forgot about it until a few years ago I went to look for it via the web. The mists of time had confused my memory, and I thought it was called ‘The Angry Cloud’. Recently I remembered the cloud wasn’t angry, but hungry. I found it straight away - ‘The Hungry Cloud’ is a fantasy novel by Tom Ingram, published in 1971. It may have taken forty-eight years to follow Noel Wallace’s suggestion but I’ve got a copy now.
The second one that got away? I’m ashamed to say it was ‘The Hobbit’.
Every year on Christmas Eve I used to get dragged along to the midnight Carol Service. As a sweetener, I was allowed to open one present when we got back; after all, it was the early hours of Christmas Day by then. On one such occasion, I must have been 9 at the time, I picked something book-shaped. It was (and still is) a paperback edition with Tolkien’s own drawing of Smaug flying over the Lonely Mountain on the cover. I resolved to start it after completing whatever I was currently reading; I was rarely ‘between books’ for more than a few hours. By then I was reading science fiction and horror intended for adults, albeit fairly traditional stuff without much adult content. I didn’t discover James Herbert until I was 11.
I began The Hobbit with the precocious attitude (I did say I’m not proud of it) that I was way beyond children’s books but I’d lower myself because it was a present… and it had a dragon on the cover. All went well until the dwarves began to arrive at Bag End. There’s a part where Tolkien describes the various coloured hats that are hanging on Bilbo’s coat hooks. Peter Jackson leaves that bit out of the film; I don’t blame him, it was almost Enid Blytonesque and I gave up reading there and then.
A few years later a kid in my secondary school library was reading The Lord of the Rings. He said it was his third time and couldn’t believe I never had. Dipping in, it clearly wasn’t a children’s book. But reading the introduction, I realised I had to complete The Hobbit first. So I ignored the brightly coloured dwarf hats, forced my way past the hat rack and soon kicked myself for not persisting previously. If I learnt one thing from the experience, ever since then I’ve found it really hard to give up on a book unless it’s really bad.
By the time I was eleven I had a passion for horror and science fiction. I read as many of the Doctor Who novelisations published by Target as I could. A paperback cost around 15 pence then so even with 50p for pocket money I could buy several at a time from WH Smith. Around this time I came across a book called The Rats by James Herbert. We moved house when I was 11 and I remember laying on the floor in the new one, engrossed in the book while the removal men were going in and out. At the time I thought it was the greatest thing ever - violence, gore, thrilling set pieces, swearing and sex. The success of The Rats launched a whole range of similar stories, creatures turning against humans, often inspired by Cold War fears of radiation or nuclear testing: cats, dogs, spiders, giant praying mantis and Guy N Smith’s crabs. While I was at secondary school I read all of James Herbert’s work. Well, it kept them off Aunt Edna’s chair. And if you get that reference maybe you read them too.
Somewhere along the line though I became more critical, and that’s what I’d like to explore in part two.
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