Comfort reading

Ask any fervent reader and they'll tell you that they have a treasured few books they read over and over again. Know you're going to be stuck on a train or a coach? Want to fill a few minutes with the familiar delights of a well-loved tale? Or maybe you like to check in with a long-standing paper friend, just to see if you're still as close as you remember?

Books - like music, scents and photographs - have the power to magically reconnect us with the past. When you choose your reading matter with discernment, every book you read seeps into your DNA. Sometimes it's an author's entire works, rather than a single book, but the same principle applies.

Richard Bach's The Gift of Wings is one such book for me. Just holding the battered cover transports me 25+ years through time. I'm on the Staten Island ferry, heading for Manhattan, and wondering how to spin my disaster of an American Dream into a more positive adventure.

I can see my 1986 self now, a bagel in one hand and Gift of Wings in the other, breathing in the salt-sea air as I devour R Bach's collection of old articles, especially the ones that speak of limitless possibility and the freedom to shape my own destiny. I glance up, periodically, watching as Manhattan looms ever larger, and the water glistens like a molten, silvery sheet. And I whisper to the stern sky, "This is the moment I have chosen." Ah, bless.

I rarely read the pieces in order - I have my favourites there too. Over the years, those preferences change, and sometimes so does my attitude towards the book's contents. I guard against the internal 'tsk-tsk', where the jaded, cynical side of my nature swamps the bright-eyed optimist to mutter despondently, 'Yes, well, it's fine for you to think like that, but look at the life you've been able to lead.'

I know differently, of course. I only have to look at my own, meandering path to recognise that choices are made every day and consequences pop up around us like daisies. I started reading Richard Bach's books in 1983, long before Gift of Wings joined my travelling bag for $3.95 from some un-named bookstore (but probably Weiser's).

I know too that all writers write a version of themselves - a 'who I wish to be and be seen as'. But then, don't we all?

My comfort reading also includes:

Illusions - Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach

Wuthering Heights - Charlotte Bronte

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Secrets of Dr Taverner - Dion Fortune.

So what's on your list?

one August night

I was sat at home yesterday, staring into space as Anne waited for me to tune back into the present. She knows me well enough now that these internal jaunts no longer merit comment. I'd like to say that I was working on a short story or one of the two novels I'm developing; but the truth is I was snagged on a memory.

I'm 23 and it's a hot, sticky August evening. It's my last day on Staten Island and the end of about a year spent living the American Dream. Well, surviving it anyway. My flatmate Lillian and I are downstairs, gazing out on the street and there's no one around. Out the corner of my eye I spot this pinpoint of light, roaming in the evening air towards me. It's a firefly. And as soon as I see it, this wave of sadness, of unrequited longing for the year-that-never-was, chokes my thoughts. I'm transfixed by this tiny glow and all at once a host of them appear and circle around us.

Lillian is non-plussed; they're just fireflies after all. But I swallow hard and realise that I'd never seen them before, not until this night - my last night. And at that moment, it becomes a metaphor and a distillation of the whole experience. In my quest for the wrong woman and a life that was never mine, I'd missed out on so many other things. Small things perhaps, but things of beauty and potency. Then we go back inside and watch some TV while I finish packing. The next morning I flew back to Britain - thinner, wiser and paler (if that's possible).

So yesterday, there I was and this 23 year-old self drifted over to me. He was a writer too, of course, and many of his primitive ideas have since made it to print. It wasn't a social visit though. I think he was trying to tell me that there's more to the writer's life than fixating on the next round of submissions and worrying about my income. For one thing, there's fireflies, if you know where to look.