The Book that Made Me Read online

  I couldn’t believe I’d opened a young adult book that spoke to my life. It was wildly empowering and gratifying especially because the author was of Italian background. While I had always wanted to be a writer, the stories I was dabbling with continued to be set in American or English towns and cities. Although I’d graduated to writing mysteries involving kidnappings and murdered friends, a prom or English boarding school always managed to slip their way in. I was writing stories about white people, for white people and as if I was a white person. Was it possible that my own story might have some worth?

  Above all else, this is what Melina Marchetta offered me: a light bulb moment, illuminating crevices and corners of my imagination and creativity that had been kept in the dark. The books I’d read had socialised me into subconsciously discounting my story. Suddenly I realised that my own experiences just might matter.

  And so it is perhaps no surprise that when I set out to write my own novel based on my own experiences at the age of fifteen, I placed Looking for Alibrandi in a prominent position on my desk. Whenever I felt weary of my writing, lost confidence in my voice and felt plagued by self-doubt, Alibrandi would gently remind me to celebrate my identity, seize the chance to insist on an alternative story, one told on my terms and through my own agency. And for that I am indebted to Melina Marchetta who, in bringing Josie to life, in some way managed to do the same to my story too.

  Twelve Reasons

  Markus Zusak

  Twelve Reasons why The Outsiders by SE Hinton is one of the books that made me me:

  1. It has a great first line, about dark and light and Paul Newman, so how can you go wrong?

  2. It’s about brothers, and about boys who behave like brothers.

  3. The Greasers have ridiculously outlandish names, like Sodapop, Ponyboy and Two-Bit.

  4. There’s danger and love and fighting and caring – just like there is in all of us.

  5. Diane Lane is magnificent as Cherry Valance in the movie (way better than Cruise, Dillon, Lowe and Swayze combined).

  6. It differentiates between the meaning of something that’s tough and something that’s tuff. (That said, I’m still trying to figure it out.)

  7. It led to even better books by SE Hinton, like Tex and especially Rumble Fish – which in my mind is her greatest book, or, actually, a ninety-two-page masterpiece.

  8. SE Hinton was seventeen years old when the book was published, which made me believe, when I was seventeen, that I could be a writer too.

  9. For two decades now, certain friends and I still tell each other to stay gold – just for laughs (but deep down we really mean it).

  10. The toughest Greaser, Dallas Winston, is a great antihero.

  11. When I was fourteen, I stayed up all night in my yellow-lit bedroom to finish reading this book. It bothered the hell out of my brother on the other side of the room – but I couldn’t have cared less.

  12. (And most important … ) After I read this book, for the longest time, I wanted to be Ponyboy.

  A Short Leap

  Cathy Cassidy

  I learned to love reading early on. When I was six, our class teacher walked a class of forty small children on a ten-minute trip to the local library; we got a guided tour, someone read us a story and on the way out we were each given a library ticket.

  I told my parents this at teatime, later that day, and Dad’s face lit up. Half an hour later we were driving back to that library together, to choose books in what was to become a regular routine. We had no bookshelves at home, so the books piled up in heaps on the floor, and occasionally my mum tidied them away into a cupboard under the stairs. Dad and I widened our net and the weekly library forays began to take in two more local libraries; my mum and brother didn’t share our love of reading, so we managed to get library tickets in their names, so we could borrow still more books.

  I loved reading, but even so, the only books I actually owned were the occasional Christmas annual.

  Then, the year I turned twelve, something amazing happened. I was given a book, and it wasn’t an annual or a book of nursery rhymes or fairytales but a real novel. The book was Watership Down by Richard Adams.

  I was amazed. It wasn’t my birthday, it wasn’t Christmas … and yet here was a book, a perfect, awesome book with small print and endless chapters and the promise of escapism and magic. The book even had an amazing cover, a low-key, illustrated image of a rabbit with a landscape of hills and downs behind. I loved rabbits, so that was a plus point. Suddenly, I could see the world from their perspective, imagine myself in a whole different world … Watership Down is a real adventure story about a group of rabbits who escape to seek a new home when one of them senses that danger is coming; their journey is exciting and difficult, and they outwit humans and make enemies before finally establishing a better future.

  The story pulled me in at once. Like all the best books, this glued itself to my hands and I couldn’t put it down all weekend. I was miles away, with a big bunch of rabbits, in the middle of a brilliant adventure. On Monday morning I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving the book behind, so I sneaked it into my schoolbag.

  There was just one problem. I was twelve, and in the second year of a pretty tough secondary school where reading was not always considered to be cool. None of my friends were bookworms, and the idea of being caught reading a book with a big picture of a rabbit on the cover was my worst nightmare. People would laugh and call me a bookworm – worse, they’d think I was a baby, reading a book about rabbits. Watership Down was probably the most grown-up book I’d read up to that point, not babyish at all, but my classmates might not know that.

  In the end, the need to keep on reading won out, and I headed off to school with the book hidden away under my school stuff. I was hoping to find a quiet moment to myself to read in peace, although in a big, rowdy school like ours that wasn’t very likely. Maybe on the bus coming home?

  Finally, I struck lucky. Our English teacher was late coming to class and my friends gathered in a noisy, gossipy knot outside the classroom door, making the most of the unexpected freedom. Instead of joining them, I headed in the opposite direction and found a quiet corner with a radiator where I could lean and read in peace, all at a safe distance from my classmates.

  I opened up the book, taking great care to place a hand over the embarrassing rabbit picture on the cover, and right away I was tugged back into the story, battling life and death with Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and Keehar.

  Then, the worst thing I could have imagined happened. The coolest boy in our year walked up to me and said, “What are you reading?” He had never even looked at me before, let alone spoken to me. My face was crimson with shame, but I had no choice but to show him the book.

  “Watership Down is the best book I’ve ever read,” he said.

  I was speechless. All that worrying … and instead of being laughed at or picked on, I’d made a new friend, someone who loved reading just as much as I did.

  That book and that incident will always stay in my head, because I learned a huge lesson, one that I should have known all along. Reading is cool – no matter what. No need to feel shy about it, no need to explain your choice of book, no need to panic and assume people won’t understand: reading is a magic carpet that can take you anywhere and everywhere, the perfect way to escape a less-than-perfect life. As soon as I worked that out, it was just a short leap to realising that creating my own stories was possible too … and a whole different world opened up to me.

  Watership Down … the book that made me understand why we need the magic of stories, and why we should never, ever be ashamed of that.

  “What Happens Next?”

  Will Kostakis

  I should probably start by saying I don’t know how much of this is true.

  It started off as true, but like all the stories I keep repeating, it’s grown with each telling, reshaped by six years of audience reaction. Now, it lies somewhere between “Will taking creative licence” and �
��Will padding a little kernel of truth with a whole lot of fiction”.

  But that doesn’t change that little kernel of truth: I am here, I am who I am, with the career that I have, because of one book – Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

  Don’t get me wrong, there was a trail of books that inspired me before Hatchet fell into my lap halfway through Year Six. Enid Blyton lit a spark with her Faraway Tree adventures, and Morris Gleitzman fanned it into a flame with consistent, awe-inspiring brilliance. But none of them had the impact that Hatchet did.

  And full disclosure, I only read about six pages.

  Each day, my Year Six teacher Mr Tait set fifteen minutes aside after recess for silent reading. He would select a book, and over the course of a term, we would read it at our own pace. Hatchet was his latest selection. Since my parents’ divorce was fairly recent and fairly volatile, I had expected to connect with Hatchet. It opened with thirteen-year-old Brian in a light plane en route to his father’s, where he’d be spending the summer.

  Great. I was familiar with the every-second-weekend song and dance. I was totally on board.

  Then Brian mentioned the hatchet his mum gave him as a going-away present. Now, my mum wasn’t a big fan of my dad, but she never stood at the door on one of his Fridays and said, “Oh, and by the way, here’s an axe in case you … you know.”

  Sure, now as an adult, I can see the perfectly valid reasons for giving Brian an axe. I mean, he’d be spending the summer with his father in the Canadian wilderness. But back then I just couldn’t relate to it. I didn’t consider all those trees that could be chopped down for firewood. Instead, my mind wandered … I asked myself, why would author Gary Paulsen give his main character an axe? And why would anyone let a thirteen year old take it on board a plane rather than force him to stow it with his luggage?

  The answers trickled in. Maybe the plane was going to crash. Maybe he’d be the sole survivor. Maybe he’d be left to fend for himself in the harsh wilderness with only an axe.

  I brushed my concerns aside. There was no way the story was going to be that predictable. I flicked ahead. The pilot had a heart attack, he died, the plane crash-landed and Brian was left to fend for himself.

  I put the book down. Now, I was a big reader, and I had never encountered a book I didn’t like before. And while I know now that it’s unfair to judge Hatchet after six pages, as an eleven year old I felt quite passionate about not reading a seventh. I had seen the author working. I had pulled back the curtain and spotted the Wizard.

  And I didn’t want to read it anymore.

  It was a new feeling for me. I had never not done what Mr Tait told me to. I was eager to please (nauseatingly so), and I took pride in not only doing what I was told, but doing it first.

  I glanced around the room. The hatchet hadn’t seemed to bother anyone else. Some kids had even made a start on the questions we’d been given on the first chapter.

  I knew that if I sat there doing nothing, I’d get into trouble, so I reached for a pen. Hatchet hadn’t reflected back my experiences as a “child from a broken home”, so I decided to start a story that did. I had recently met my father’s new girlfriend. It was the first time one of my parents was game enough to introduce me to a prospective partner. It was weird and awkward, for my brothers and me at least; Dad was comfortable enough to pursue the world record for most public displays of affection in one day.

  So I wrote about that.

  I only managed a few paragraphs before the end of reading time.

  The next day, when the rest of the class cracked open their copies of Hatchet, I propped mine open in front of me and continued working on my story. I got to the bottom of the page. To everybody watching, I had just finished writing a very detailed response to Hatchet’s first chapter.

  Well, to almost everybody.

  “What are you writing?” Ben, the kid sitting next to me, asked.

  Before I could answer, he’d snatched the paper out from under my pen and started reading. He chuckled when he got to the description of Dad playing tonsil tennis with his new girlfriend in the first paragraph. He tsk-tsked sarcastically every time he came to a rude word. He got to the end of the page and he checked the back. There was no more.

  “What happens next?” he asked.

  I hadn’t really thought about it. The looming threat of our teacher inspecting our English books had me reconsidering my whole not-reading-Hatchet stance.

  “Well, tomorrow, I wanna read page two,” he said.

  The next day, I slid page two over to him. I started writing a third without him demanding it.

  Then the boy beside Ben asked him what he was reading.

  And since we were in Year Six and he hadn’t mastered the art of subtlety, Ben said, “I’m reading this,” and passed the story along. I was too busy writing to worry about getting caught, but I probably should have put the kibosh on people sharing it around, because a few silent reading times later, when my teacher looked up from his marking, no one in the back row was reading Hatchet. Instead, they were passing around my story, one sheet at a time, arguing about who got to read the next page first.

  Naturally, Mr Tait was annoyed, and when he asked who’d written it, naturally, everybody pointed the finger at me.

  Mr Tait collected the story and I got a stern, “Kostakis, my office, tomorrow morning.”

  I got surnamed. I had never been surnamed. Only the kids who were in serious trouble got surnamed. I didn’t get much sleep that night. I was certain this was it, the end of the road – I was getting expelled. Every rude word, every gut-churning description of my father’s disgusting PDAs, all of it flashed before my eyes. Mr Tait had read that.

  Yep. Expelled.

  The next morning, I was summoned into Mr Tait’s office. My story was stacked on his desk.

  He sighed. ‘William, I read your story …’

  Expelled. Definitely expelled.

  He leaned in closer. “So … what happens next?”

  I went to protest, convince him I wasn’t worth expelling, but I stopped. I wasn’t expelled. He’d asked what happened next. He’d liked the story. He wanted more. And I seized the opportunity.

  “Sir, I don’t know. It’s hard to write this and read Hatchet,” I said.

  It was deviously manipulative and it worked. Mr Tait suggested that instead of reading Hatchet, I finish my story. I did, all twenty pages of it. At the end of Year Six, he suggested that I spend my first year of high school trying to turn it into a novel. I did that too. My first rejection letter from a publisher soon followed.

  The story grew and changed as I did. I cut out parts to make way for new life experiences as I lived them. Each year, I submitted the finished product, and each year, I was rejected.

  But the nature of the rejections changed. The two-sentence “Please never, ever submit to us again” replies slowly became “It’s promising, but our manuscript assessor has suggested you look at x, y and z”. In Year Twelve, I got a yes.

  By that stage, the manuscript bore little resemblance to the story I had started in Year Six. It was about a group of teenagers who signed up to star in a reality TV show. But beneath that, there was still that desire to reflect my own experiences as a child with divorced parents. And even after all those years, and all those edits, I managed to keep the scene with the super awkward PDAs between a father and his lady friend that I first wrote in Year Six.

  Because of Hatchet. When we talk about the benefits of reading, we tend to only talk about the books we love, but the books we don’t enjoy, those we don’t connect with, can be just as beneficial. They tell us about ourselves, our tastes and our limits (an axe on a plane is apparently where I draw the line). The trick is to not let them push us off the bandwagon, to not let them curb our love of reading.

  So if nothing speaks to you, then pick up a pen and speak for yourself. Yours may be the voice that someone else is looking for.

  The Great Sense of Unease

  Mandy Hager


  I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with politics and social justice. Don’t get me wrong: I hate the games politicians play to score points against their opponents – a kind of verbal bullying, often sexist, sometimes racist, and always designed to deflect away from serious issues that affect you and me. No, the kind of politics I find so fascinating and important is the big picture stuff: who is holding all the power and control, how do they get to hold it and maintain it, and whose interests do they have at heart?

  I’m what those who don’t share my particular views on the world might call a “bleeding-heart leftie” – probably adding “greenie” too. The joke is that they think this is insulting me, while, instead, I wear such labels with pride!

  Let’s break it down to see what an accusation like that is really saying. “Bleeding heart” to me equals someone who is able to empathise with others, who hurts when they hurt, who feels their sorrows, pains and losses. “Leftie” equals “left wing” – and that means I believe in sharing wealth throughout the whole of a society, not hoovering it all up so it only goes to a few rich guys at the top. And “greenie”, well that’s a no-brainer! It means caring about the health and future of our planet (and everything that lives on it, not just us).

  How did I come to hold such strong (some would say stroppy) views? I guess the same way you developed your views. It’s a blend of how I was raised and by whom, where and what era I was born, and what I have learned (and read) since then.