To celebrate International Literacy Day 2017, Penguin Books Australia asked on Facebook: What is the first book you remember reading?

While I don’t recall reading my first book, it must have been a Sooty or Joe 90 Annual. I still have a worn copy of Sooty (handed down to my son), but sadly the boy spy Joe 90 went AWOL long ago.

I lived with my grandparents as a kid, and they had kept my father’s Film Fun Annuals from the 1940s. And I recall reading the comic-book style stories about Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello et al.

Enid Blyton Inspiration

As for “chapter books”, I read my father’s Biggles’ adventure stories (“Chocks away, Algy!”), and I loved reading Enid Blyton’s adventure series, the Secret Seven and Famous Five.

And the Famous Five inspired me to write and illustrate a Blyton-esque adventure book as a ten-year-old, Sand Island — I still have the treasured first-and-only edition.

Share Your Writing on Tall And True

So while I don’t remember the first book I read. I do remember the first book I wrote 45 years ago! 

What about you? What’s the first book you remember reading?

© 2017 Robert Fairhead 

N.B. You might also be interested in this blog post, The Gorilla Hunters by RM Ballantyne (March 2018). It’s about one of my father’s first books.