Saba Sams: I've no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again'

"I always found most children's books overly virtuous and safe, but Wilson's never were. I love her for that. My favourite book growing up The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I read it again recently, having mostly forgotten it, and loved it just as much. It's totally alive."

"The book that changed me as a teenager Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. I read it at university when I was nineteen. I'd never read anything like it. It expanded my mind by making me feel so many things all at once."

"I internalised at some point that writers were supposed to leap from book to book showing off their huge range, but I find Riley's approach far braver and more compelling. The book that made me want to be a writer The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith, particularly a story in the collection called Erosive. The structure is disordered, but the disorder is so considered."

"When I first picked it up it seemed too hard, and I couldn't make sense of it. I tried again some years later, having just put my baby down for a nap, and I'd read the whole thing by the time he woke up. It was a singular reading experience, totally out of body, and exactly what I'd needed in the moment."

A reader reflects on formative literary experiences spanning childhood to adulthood. Jacqueline Wilson's honest children's books first inspired pride through their refusal of sentimentality. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie demonstrated enduring vitality upon rereading. Kathy Acker's experimental work expanded emotional and intellectual possibilities. Gwendoline Riley's repeated focus on enigmatic female protagonists challenged assumptions about authorial range. Ali Smith's structural playfulness in The Whole Story and Other Stories sparked the desire to write. Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva provided a transformative reading experience when circumstances aligned perfectly. Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? offers versatility across moods through sentence-level craft and melancholic wisdom.

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