Mal Peet tells us about his favourite books...
It’s always hard for me to pick ‘favourite’ books. When I was a kid, I was a football fanatic half the time, a bookworm the other half. I loved (and still love) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I was hooked on W. E. Johns’ series of books about Biggles, who was a World War I fighter pilot. I read loads of comics, including a series called ‘Classics Illustrated’ which was my introduction to ‘serious’ literature.
There was no such thing as Teenage Fiction when I was a teenager, so I went straight from children’s books to adult fiction. Especially American fiction. I fell under the spell of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler. Secretly, I read really bad thrillers by people like Harold Robbins and Hank Janson, mainly because they had sex in them. (Janson wrote books with titles like ‘Sweetheart Here’s Your Grave’ and ‘Death Wore a Petticoat’).
As an adult, I read too much to have particular favourites, although I’ll read anything by Rose Tremain, Thomas Pynchon, Alice Monro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Trevor or Joseph O’Connor.
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