My earliest reading memory I was seven. It was a book called Run With the Wind, by Tom McCaughren, which is like an Irish riff on Watership Down but with foxes instead of rabbits. I loved it.
The book that changed me as a teenager Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I was 14 and didn't really expect to finish it, so I was surprised when it made me laugh out loud. Then, I found the latter half of the novel heartbreaking.
If you compare Tolstoy to, say, Flaubert, they cover very similar ground, but Flaubert's work, though brilliant, is flecked with misanthropy, whereas Tolstoy has a peculiar ability to examine his characters' worst flaws yet not make those flaws definitive.
After that year, I knew I wanted to write. The book I came back to Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I was 16 and perplexed... I'd anticipated an archetypal romance... whereas, in fact, it turned out to be a rather unhinged story about disturbed and traumatized characters.
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