Bio

It was an odd array of books that found their way onto the freshly-painted shelves in my new bedroom at home: a couple of volumes from a set of encyclopedias and an old, outdated atlas; the hard-cover comic exploits of Sooty and Sweep, and Noddy and Big Ears, and stories from Shakespeare; and paperbacks, Captains Courageous and The Cruel Sea, God's Little Acre and The Devil's Advocate (the one by Morris West), The Carpetbaggers and more. It was a heady brew indeed, just the ticket to shape an impressionable young mind. The texts we were given to read at primary school paled by comparison, and even an over-eager Grade 6 teacher's serialised Friday afternoon recitations from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner fell largely on deaf ears.

High school similarly failed to provide much in the way of literary nutriment or, when it did, it didn't deliver the goods. The Day of the Triffids and The Lord of the Flies were misread as simple adventure tales; in-class rehearsals of Under Milk Wood promptly deteriorated into Dadaesque farce; and insistently fatuous speculations about Emma Woodhouse's sexual orientation spoiled an otherwise promising first foray into Austen. Compulsory library periods afforded a fleeting acquaintance with Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and others of their ilk, where any one volume could be plucked from the central carousel in place of the volume begun the previous week without ever really noticing the difference.

It was only the chance discovery of Slaughterhouse-Five for a wide reading assignment, and the slow-burning realisation of how the Tralfamadorian excursion with ex-porn star Montana Wildhack does actually fit into the novel, and of how the reader's experience of reading the text and the experiences and sensibilities of the Billy Pilgrim character and the author's own wartime experience of the firebombing of Dresden have all been plugged into one another by Vonnegut, that began to light the way towards a truer and more visceral appreciation of the pleasures of the text.