Twenty-seven of the Best A Personal Reading Journey


In a specially extended Ten of the Best, Daniel Hahn takes us on a journey via 27 books you should read.


10


I’ve only recently noticed how many of the series I loved most as a child featured a protagonist who sought out their adventures in a different setting for each book. The globe-trotting Tintin was a particular favourite,


but


there were many others like it to open the world up to us young readers. Many of my non-fiction regulars were the same, now I think about it. Where children today might pore over Maps (that large-format marvel from Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel


Mizielinski) to get their


vicarious taste of the what the rest of this planet has to offer, in my childhood we collected the distinctive works of M. Šašek, in those days seemingly ubiquitous – This Is London, and many others in the series. (If you had them as a child, I bet you can still picture exactly how they looked, too.)


And, I suppose, my tastes haven’t totally changed since then; it’s certainly true that many of my recent favourite literary heroes are themselves also pretty well-travelled. I’ve lately explored Lisbon and India, and various places between, in the company of Sally Jones, for instance; if you haven’t yet experienced the brilliant The Murderer’s Ape, I recommend that journey, and Sally Jones’s company, most highly.


I also loved the Moomins, naturally, though


they were rather more


valley-bound. (I mean, what kind of monster wouldn’t love The Moomins?) And Fattypuffs and Thinifers, of course, with


those


fantastic Fritz Wegner illustrations; though I suspect it’s not as widely read today it should be, André Maurois’ story of the uniting of two seemingly irreconcilable nations is a proper, solid-gold, unimprovable classic. Like the Moomins, I know I’ll remember that one till the day I die – as any BfK reader will know, that’s so often the case with favourite books from childhood, isn’t it? To this day, I can’t see a sky-blue suit without thinking


of Conrad, the


Factory-Made Boy… (If you don’t know this Christine Nöstlinger gem,


10 Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019


it’s about a boy who is accidentally delivered – in a tin can, obviously – to the wrong house; a great book about, and against, conformity.)


What I remember relatively little from childhood, curiously, are the folk-tales and fairy-tales – I must have heard them, I suppose, but they aren’t what stayed with me. Though I’m increasingly fascinated by them now, by the stories that seem to pop up wherever in the world people build a community together, and which are retold, shared, adapted, passed down. I travel a lot (not quite as much as Tintin, but nearly) and every culture has its rich tradition – perfect for investigating on a holiday destination, I always feel. You can read the Slovakian traditional tales collected by Pavol Dobšinský when you’re weekending in Bratislava, Ivana Brlic Mazuranic’s Croatian tales in Zagreb, Trevor Zahra’s retelling of local folk tales if you happen to find yourself in Malta (the attractive Hrejjef Maltin collection comes with a CD), or – if in Romania – some more recent stories in the collection by Mircea Sintimbreanu (My Book of Twenty-Two Stories for Children). The things they have in common and the things that make them unique are equally fascinating; they don’t only enchant us, they teach us so much about each other, too. Libraries in our teemingly multicultural UK should be full of such things, really.


I haven’t been a child for quite some time,


obviously,


but children’s books remain important to me, and so I’ve managed rather cannily to build some of my work around them. I’ve edited collections of stories (including a couple of volumes for the Hay Festival’s Aarhus39 project, featuring writers like Cathy Clement, with her story Mediterranean Cruise, and Andri Antoniou, with hers, Why Rudolph Went to Rome Last Summer); and when I’m lucky I get to review children’s books, too: Evelina Daciuté and Aušra Kiudulaité’s picture book The Fox on the Swing (those lovely eye- catching illustrations) and Luize Pastore’s tremendously winning novel Dog Town most recently.


Oh, and talking about dogs (and, in this case, talking about talking dogs), I’ve also over the years come to judge a number of children’s books prizes, which in one case allowed me to reward one of the greatest children’s literary dogs of all, the eponymous heroine of Bernardo Atxaga’s Shola, a rather self-regarding, but very funny little animal who features in many spirited stories. (The same round of judging,


incidentally, introduced me


to Anton and Piranha – another of those books that never seems to have


twentyseven


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