Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

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I’m going to take a punt here and assume that WordPress is asking me about fiction. And take another punt to talk about my reading habits.

For the longest time, I read very little fiction. Exceptions included Alistair Maclean, as a youth, and George Orwell and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as a spotty twenty-year-old. I even picked up a Nietzsche once! At that time I was very much trying to “find myself”.

Orwell and Dostoyevsky, by the way, wrote some material that I found either truly sublime, or truly awful, but I suppose that’s true of every author. But don’t believe everything you hear about them – even they wrote some material that stank!

Nietzsche – well it was interesting to read someone who was so influential to the Nazis, but I came away thinking that they twisted his words an awful lot! If he hadn’t also have been German, I doubt he’d have registered with them.

But mostly I read biographies. I would spend hours in bookshops, and developed certain “rules” for choosing what to read.

I avoided actors and sports personalities. Those worlds have always seemed “fake” to me, and held absolutely no interest. In addition, I avoided authors who had several different books on the shelf. I wanted to read a book by an unknown writer. Someone ordinary, to whom something extraordinary had happened. Not something by a career author.

So I would find myself reading about things like how a black boy from a township finally got himself out of apartheid South Africa, of how a refugee from Cambodia ended up starring in a Hollywood movie, or how a fair-haired, freckle-faced thirteen-year-old American-looking boy had been seen fighting for the Mujahideen against the Russians in Afghanistan. Or (and this was fifty years ago!) what life was like for an ordinary Iranian woman living in the US!

These stories gave me a keen sense of the injustices in the world, so as regards politics, it gave me a finely-tuned radar for right and wrong. But all the time I was reading these stories, it wasn’t what you’d call literature, and I have always regretted not having read more.

It’s not as though I haven’t tried. At school, I read Shakespeare. Henry IV was enough to put me off him for life. The British school system has a lot to answer for! And even though a friend persuaded me to watch (watch!) a movie version of the far-lighter Much Ado About Nothing, it’s now something I can appreciate, but not love. Same went for Charles Dickens, or Emily Bronte. People swear how good they are, and I believe them, but they’re not for me.

And I did read some fiction as an adult. I went through a phase where I consumed pretty much everything that Tom Clancy wrote. Another phase was Alexandre Dumas. I even read The Three Musketeers – in French – to try to improve my grasp of the language. I tried reading Harlan Coben but lost interest when I saw the same formula in every book. I’m sure he’s a very rich man, but for me, that’s not what writing is about.

But all of this fiction was very much an interlude while I devoured non-fiction. At one point, there was a swathe of memoirs regarding the Holocaust. They would bring me to tears because the fates which befell the victims, I see those same things happening in Palestine and particularly the West Bank today. The faces might have changed, but the actions haven’t. And I remember listening to some Kafka a couple of years ago – to satisfy myself about what the word kafka-esque really means!

With the decline of my eyesight, unfortunately I don’t read paper books any more. Even Kindle is a step too far. But technology is life-changing and sites like Audible are a godsend. As an aside, whenever you hear people waxing lyrical about how “traditional” paper books are the only way to properly enjoy literature, remind them how accessible sites like Audible have made it.