Nothing to Declare

For a long time there was a running joke in my family. Essentially, if anyone ever asked me what I was reading, some bright spark would wittily pipe up on my behalf: “ Five Have Plenty of Fun , isn’t it, Charles?” Hilarious, right? I mean, it’s a decent, solid novel for kids, and Enid Blyton hadn’t been cancelled in the early 1990s, so sticking to this classic seemed entirely reasonable. Admittedly, by the time I turned 25 and I was still hearing the same line, I began to feel slightly aggrieved. I had, after all, completed a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Philosophy, and was about to begin a master’s in Literature. However, it wasn’t so much the texts I read at university as the novels I read for myself that have shaped me. I wasn’t always a reader, as the anecdote above would imply, but I did become one – at school I was pretty good at English (less so at maths) but my mum told me that if I wanted to study English as an A Level, I’d better start reading something other than the Famous Five. Here are a few of the standout books I have read since – books that have become major mile-markers on my reading journey. The dates roughly indicate when I first read the book, rather than its publication date. This is a memoir, written by former SAS vet Andy McNab. His real name is something else – he had to invent a nom de plume to protect his identity, which was one of the craziest and most exciting things I’d ever heard aged 14. It’s an utterly absorbing account of SAS squadron Bravo Two Zero’s disastrous secret mission behind enemy lines during the first Gulf War. The story is infamous – of the eight soldiers, three died, four were captured, and one got away (that was Chris Ryan, author of The One That Got Away , a rival account of the same mission). This inspired me to read the novels of Chris Ryan, Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. Yep, the guy who wrote the James Bond novels.

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