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Writer's pictureKatherine Blakeman
Jul 2812 min read

How Books Built Me: 21 Books, 21 Years


The other day, I was out driving with my mother, and I noticed a little girl walking along the pavement wearing a Cinderella dress.


“I used to have one like that,” I said.


“But you were never really into it,” my mum replied. “You were never into Disney. Or dolls, or teddies, or most toys really.”


“So what was I into then?” I replied.


“Books,” she said. And that says it all really!

 

It’s safe to say that literature has been the building blocks of my life. Some of my earliest memories are with books in my hands – not Dickens or Bronte, of course, but kids’ books. Forget iPads or Nickelodeon or movies… it was stories on paper that really held my attention.


That makes me sound about a hundred years old, doesn’t it? But no, I’m only twenty-one. Just turned twenty-one, in fact, last week. And that got me thinking about how books have shaped my life over the last twenty-one years. How they’ve influenced my personality, my decisions, and ultimately my present career as a writer. So I thought I’d compile a list. Twenty-one books that I’ve read over the last twenty-one years, all of which had a bearing on who I am today.


(NB: Yes, it starts at 2007, not 2003. You can’t expect me to be reading at the tender age of two, surely?)

 

2007 – Postman Pat

There isn’t much I can say about this one because I was, after all, only about four years old. I only know about it in the first place because I found my pre-school notes recently, and they have it written down as infant Katherine’s favourite book. I remember nothing from the book, just the TV series, so it clearly stuck with me…! I jest. It’s still the first book I apparently read, so it deserves a place on this list.


Another set of books that I discovered as a consequence of the television series. Again, I can’t remember a whole lot about them, but I remember that I read them. With assistance, of course – I was an ‘advanced reader’, but not that advanced! The addiction to books continued…


2009 – I couldn’t think of a book for this year, so we’ll move straight on to…


2010 – Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and Malory Towers by Enid Blyton


These are both books that my mother got me into.


Black Beauty was actually her copy, and I still have it today. It’s leather-bound, embossed simply with the title on the front, and it smells like a book. I’m sure you know what I mean by that! I felt – and still feel – as if I have to handle it with kid gloves, but that didn’t stop me reading it! It’s one of those classics that you can’t help but fall into, at least not if you’re anything like I was, aged seven. And you may think that seven is a bit young for such a heavy, advanced book… but somehow I got through it. And I loved it! (Of course, I may have the wrong year altogether, but I know it was either 2010 or 2011. Close enough.)


I seem to recall it took me a couple of tries to get into Malory Towers. The first time, I remember reading the opening of the first book and not feeling anything. In fact, I was confused – I didn’t realise it was set in the 1940s, so I wondered why they were getting on a train and not a bus! (Seven year old logic.) My mum said I was probably a bit too young. And so it turned out, because when she gave them back to me a while later, it was completely different. I ploughed straight through them, then straight through the second series (although those were written by Pamela Cox, not Blyton herself). That started me on an Enid Blyton craze. The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, St Clare’s, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Naughtiest Girl In the School… I couldn’t get enough! I know she’s not really flavour of the month these days, but she was for me back then. And this is how I started writing. I wanted to recreate in someone else the feelings that Blyton created in me. So I began to write short school-based stories (clearly inspired by Blyton’s and mixed with my own school experiences). My teachers read them out, and I got good feedback. And from there, as you can probably guess, the writing never stopped…


2011 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

I must preface this by saying that I did not read the 'proper' version. I read a kids’ version, with slightly simpler vocabulary. I have a vague memory of the cover being blue, but can I find it now? Absolutely not! What I do remember, however, is borrowing it from the school library, and hanging on to it well past the return date, because I kept wanting to read it again and again! You can imagine how well that went down with my parents – and my teacher – when they found out. Once I returned it, my parents did find me another copy… but it wasn’t the same one. Rather, this one was the official adult-written version, full of indices and annotations that completely lost me. I remember going from that to reading Little Lord Fauntleroy because my teacher recommended it, but that one left me cold too. Clearly there was just something about Heathcliff, and Catherine, and Catherine, and the Lintons.


Another book with horses, and another one that left a huge impression on me. I can’t say that I really remember the plot – other than the obvious: horse goes to war. But what I can remember is how I felt. How intrigued I was. For a budding writer, the next steps were therefore obvious: recreate it. And so I did. I spent evening after evening sitting at my father’s laptop with a Microsoft Word document, churning out words that eventually totalled over 300 A4 pages (although I can’t remember how big the font was, which obviously has a strong bearing). They were the ramblings of an eight- or nine-year-old, clearly inspired by Morpurgo but not an exact copy, but still – pretty impressive, I suppose. My teachers liked it, at least.


2013 – Journey To The River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

This was yet another book that school brought to my attention. My class studied it – and by that I mean we read the entire thing as a class, and used it as a focal point for pretty much every activity we did, for weeks. I’d never really thought about the Amazon, or Brazil, at all – but Ibbotson brought them to life alongside the characters, and opened my eyes to the power of fiction to transport people to another life, another time, another world.


Horses yet again! But this time, it wasn’t just the horses that drew me in. Abby’s life in 1960s California was so incredibly different from anything I’d ever known – not just in life, but in fiction. Religion was something alluded to in many books, but religious fundamentalism? In a kids’ book? You don’t get that very often. And yet somehow it was age-appropriate, blended with the plot so you can see Abby’s self-development over the years, with the horses providing a constant steady backdrop.


I’m a speedy reader, but even I surprised myself with this one. I read this book – which is a proper chunkster, a not-inconsiderable size – in just a couple of days. It did require me staying up until the wee hours, but I did it. I was just that hooked! I was just starting to get into modern history (although I didn’t start writing it until a couple of years later) and this book drew me in. It was also my first time learning about the suffrage movement, which I ended up researching thoroughly and covering in my first book, The Silent Chapter. This book was also a good balance of romance and realism, but without the romance dominating the rest of the plot. It was my first book by Jacqueline Wilson – and to date my only – and I still have it, just as I still have most of the kids’ books I’ve talked about so far.


Yes, another equine one! I promise it’s the last. My love/obsession of/with horses was very much in its heyday, so when I discovered there was a book about a teenager rescuing a horse and turning it into an eventer worthy of every possible award, I was immediately hooked. The romantic undertones were a nice touch, but it was the immensely detailed deep-dive into the psychology and science of horse training that really did it for me. And the beauty of the writing helped, too.


(I’ve just realised that this is the first modern-day book I’ve actually talked about in this list, aside from the children’s books. Maybe I should start writing historical fiction again.)


If you’ve been following me for a while, you may know that I had invasive spinal fusion surgery in 2017, requiring several months recovery. My friend brought me a goody bag just before I went into hospital, consisting of a colouring book, pens, Maltesers and… Summer At Hope Meadows, by Lucy Daniels. It was a continuation of Daniels’ veterinary-themed series for kids, which I’d devoured at around the age of eight or nine, but written more for adults. I read it to pass the many long hours of being bedridden in hospital, and not only did it distract me from the horrors of the experience itself, but it gave me hope that I would get out of there and recover. Which, of course, I did.


I’ve put these two together because I read them both in two days, on an overnight trip to the Cotswolds in May 2018. I started Sunrise At Butterfly Cove at about midday, and stayed up until one o’clock the following morning to finish it. I just couldn’t put it down! And afterwards, I couldn’t get to sleep, because I was so taken by the beautiful simplicity of the story and Bennett’s writing. So I hauled my laptop out of its bag and – still in the wee hours of the morning – got writing. I was midway through writing The Silent Chapter, and I still remember which bits I wrote that night. It was the first ‘adult’ (as in not-written-for-kids, not as in X-rated) book that I’d read, and it reawakened my love for reading, which had been slowly eclipsed by my phone over the last couple of years. A Family Recipe enhanced it. I spent the next day reading that one – in the car, in cafes, wherever we were, the book came with me – and it had the same effect. Beautiful cosy homey-ness, like the books were giving me a warm hug.


I was actually on holiday when I first read this one – not in Italy, but it made me want to visit. It’s taken five years, but I am finally going next month. Not to Naples or Rome, like Sandy in the book, but still. It ties together so many different characters with so many different backstories from so many different walks of life, and it gave sixteen-year-old me what was probably my first real taste of the infinite possibilities of the world.


This one is a memoir written by Deborah Wearing, the wife of Clive Wearing. In 1985, encephalitis destroyed parts of Clive’s brain – particularly the hippocampus, which (to put it simply) is the ‘memory centre’ of the brain. I was studying Psychology at the time, hence how I knew of Clive as a case study, and my textbook mentioned that Deborah had written a book. So during lockdown, to extend my knowledge, I read it. And it changed my perspective on so many things, particularly the finiteness of life. How important it is to show the people around you that you love them, because the most ordinary day may in fact be your last chance. And as I got older, I thought even deeper. About love, and music (Clive is a musician), and how they are processed in our brains and bodies. I summed up all my thoughts in a monologue in my third book, Love You However, said by Petra.


  “Have you ever heard of Clive Wearing?”


  I shook my head.


  “Brilliant musician. Absolutely wonderful. Lost pretty much the entirety of his memory in the eighties because of a virus. But you know what did remain in there? Two things: his ability to play, read and understand music, and his love for his wife. He has one of the most extreme cases of amnesia known to man, with information hitting his brain and disappearing within a matter of seconds, and yet he can still play music. And play it perfectly. If he hits a set of repeat marks, he somehow knows where he is in the music, whether he’s already repeated the bars or not. When every other part of his short-term memory is entirely decimated, how can this be? I was thinking about it the other night when I couldn’t sleep, and the only reason I could come up with is that music is in a league of its own. It is unparalleled when it comes to being processed in the brain. It transcends vocabulary and reasoning. It has its own rules and processes. That’s how it cuts so deeply. And that’s why it takes someone special, someone with that… cognitive makeup, to truly understand it. Like you and I.”


2021 – The Lives We Left Behind by Olivia Bratherton-Wilson and One Golden Summer by Clare Lydon and TB Markinson

And now we get to the Sapphic fiction! The reading of Sapphic fiction, at least… I’d started attempting to write what would eventually become The Summer We’ve Had back in summer 2019. I can’t remember how I actually discovered that there was an entire genre out there dedicated to Women Loving Women… I think I was just browsing Amazon one day, and The Lives We Left Behind came up, shortly followed by One Golden Summer. I read them both within a week while I was on holiday, and they opened up a whole new world for me. I wanted more. And I wanted to write more. Which, of course, I did. As you can see by looking at my books now!


These books did very different things for me. So they’re getting a paragraph each.


Firstly, The Goodmans. I read the whole thing in about three days flat while on a trip to York to see some friends, starting on the train journey there and finishing on the train journey back. Maggie Goodman is exactly the kind of steely, fiery personality I aspire to recreate in my own characters. On top of that, there was the incredible relatability of the other characters – which on the surface may seem odd given that they’re all so unique, nuanced and quirky, but it works. And just to top it off, the descriptions of the scenery made me want to hop off the train and head straight for Ludbury. Too bad it doesn’t actually exist.


And secondly, All My Mothers. Oh my goodness, how to describe the impact this one had on me? Again, I found Eva so immensely relatable. Not her plight – I am fortunate enough to know my backstory – but her… everything else. Her voice, I recognise as echoing my own internal voice. The gumption and naivety of her as a young child, growing stronger and more steely as she grows up until she makes the executive decision to stay in Cordoba and take control of her own destiny. And the story itself! I could read it ten times and still spot tiny little details and links that I’ve missed. No detail is superfluous – it seems as if every word does a job. Like The Goodmans, Joanna’s writing in All My Mothers is something I aspire to in my own books. I’ll get there.


2023 – Truth And Measure (the DWP fanfiction) by Telanu/Roslyn Sinclair

I discovered The Devil Wears Prada itself in 2019, and it awoke my interest in fashion. This was also around the time I was starting to think about my sexuality, so imagine my surprise when I learned that there was a whole avenue of Miranda/Andy fanfiction out there! Truth And Measure was the first one I discovered, and it’s the only one I’ve actually read in full, because I can’t find anything that comes anywhere close to beating it. I’ve read the actual book versions (Truth And Measure and Above All Things), but Miranda and Andy still have my heart. And they inspired me to write my own ice-queen romance (A Different Kind Of Pride, out on August 24th).


Okay, I know this is technically three books, but I can’t single just one out! I’d read a handful of books from the Four Point universe, and although crime-related books aren’t normally my thing, the lesbians sparkled too much for me to resist! And I’m so glad I took the plunge. Not only did they help distract me through an immensely stressful time for my family, these books provided me much-needed context for the rest of the Four Point series. I’ve read nearly all of them now, and I’m probably going to have to go back and re-read them all in order! Thank God for Kindle Unlimited, that’s all I’ll say…

 

There are three main points to this post.


The first was to take a trip down memory lane. I love a bit of nostalgia!


The second was to give you a bit more information about me. It’s no secret that I guard my privacy closely, but I wanted to show you that there is a real person in here, behind the words.


And the third was to say… well, thank you. Not just to the authors in this article, but to all authors. The work we do can be tough and heavy-going… but we make an impact. All of us. Even if we don’t realise it.

 

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