Matt Haig: ‘I use Winnie-the-Pooh as a pencil sharpener for the mind’ | Fiction

My earliest reading memory
I was in my childhood bedroom in Nottinghamshire. I was three or four. I was reading a free catalogue: Massey Ferguson agricultural equipment. Tractors and combine harvesters. Not much in the way of narrative, but I loved it, especially the combine harvesters. I remember a big red one in particular mesmerising me. This was the first time I had felt the joy of turning the pages to discover what was next. And what was next was very often another combine harvester.

My favourite book growing up
The Witches by Roald Dahl. I enjoyed its demented sense of adventure and mischief and transformation. I felt as if I wasn’t being educated or made a better person, but that the author was trying to terrify me and every other nine-year-old out there. I liked how sociopathic it was, even though I didn’t know the word sociopathic. It is a horror novel for kids.

The book that changed me as a teenager
SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. I am not sure of my exact age when I read it. Maybe 13 or 14. Susan Hinton wrote about teenagers – especially teenage boys – so well. It managed to be romanticised and sentimental and honest and gritty all at once. It was a friend to me, that book. I was also a big Sue Townsend fan. So Susans were my genre.

The writer who changed my mind
Emily Dickinson. She was about the only writer I could read when I was really ill in my mid-20s and knowing she too was agoraphobic, her words of light amid the dark gave me hope.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Stephen King’s Christine. It definitely isn’t his best book but I loved it and still do. I remember reading it when I was about 16 and thinking it would be so cool to take a twisted daydream from your own mind and put it out into the world.

The author I came back to
Graham Greene. I studied him to death at university but I now think he is one of the greatest. I love how he wrote. His use of metaphor and simile is the best. “He drank the brandy down like damnation.” All that stuff.

The book I reread
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I like dipping into a page and reading about an imagined fantastical Venice. It feels hypnotic. It is about as close to meditation as reading can get.

The book I could never read again
On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

The book I discovered later in life
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. It feels so surprisingly modern and urgent in its style.

The book I am currently reading
Butter by Asako Yuzuki. It’s really good.

My comfort read
AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. It was about the only thing I could read in the depths of a breakdown, and is something I often dip into. Sometimes I use it as a kind of pencil sharpener for my mind when I am writing.