“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Whilst Lemony Snicket took the approach that:

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

Whichever way you look at it, I have always been, and cannot imagine a time when I won’t be, a bookaholic. I live to consume stories. When I was little a book was the first thing I turned to in the morning, and the last thing I went to at night. Whilst with the pressures of the adult, working life, might have pushed out the former, the latter is still a habit that I just can’t live without.

My wife has long since resigned herself to the inevitable fact that we live in a small library – 1,723 books at the last count… But the truth is I love stories, and stories love me.

What was the first novel you read? 

That’s easy. It was Swallows & Amazons – much to my Mum’s disappointment as she was looking forward to reading the next chapter to me but I had already read ahead.

I’ve always read, and making up stories. I wrote my first ‘novel’ aged 9 – The Fantasy World of Ioleme – and I still have it somewhere. When I was younger, and by younger I mean anything pre-30 I think, I wasn’t good at discussing my reading with people. Blogs, online journals, Facebook, and Twitter are great places for that, and for that reason I’ve decided to connect my writing, and my reading, with other people’s reading (that’s any reading, not just the reading of my books!) in the T E Shepherd Reading Café. Why not come along and take part?

I have just listened to an excellent and very interesting edition of Front Row on Radio 4 where, conductor John Eliot Gardiner and writer Philip Pullman talked to Mark Lawson about their own private correspondence on Bach and his creative influence on them. It was fascinating and I thoroughly recommend you tuning in to the programme via the BBC’s Listen Again feature.