How I choose what I read

I've always loved reading fiction. When I was a very young boy you'd often find me with my nose stuck in a book, devouring exciting tales by the likes of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton (well, they seemed exciting at the time!). At around the age of 11 my school had reached an important anniversary and the headteacher made the obvious decision to celebrate this fact by... designing a teatowel. And on this never-to-be-used kitchen accoutrement, many children, myself included, were asked to put their name and a little comment of their choice, to commemmorate the fact that they were pupils at this school on such an occasion. My parents still treasure their copy of this graffitied dishcloth and there, amongst the obvious messages such as 'Tottenham Hotspur rule!' and 'New Kids On The Block forever!' is my contribution: 'I love Books!'

As a spotty adolescent I became enamoured of the works of Tolkien and having voraciously sped through assorted myths of elves and hobbits moved on to pale imitations such as The Sword Of Shannara. Then when I left home to study at drama school at the naive age of 18, I more or less stopped reading novels, having far too many other things to do...

But in my twenties, I started again, and after reading quite a lot of dross - and, with the critical eye I'd garnered through studying plays as a student, realising it as such - decided that I would find out what were considered the really essential novels. Having been geekily obsessed with swords and sorcery in my teenage years, I'd missed out on a lot of great books. So, using the mighty power of the Internet, I did my research and found out about the classics and the modern works that would mean I'd be a well-read individual. As I tentatively started this delightful hobby, I soon realised that these books were classics for a reason. Whether it was a 19th-century novel about revolutionary France (A Tale Of Two Cities) or an anti-establishment escapade set in an asylum (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) , it was really, really good. Of course, some were better than others (take a step back, Heart Of Darkness, I didn't like you very much) but the fact that they had been filtered through years, decades or sometimes centuries of other readers' experience and still held up as monumentally entertaining or enlightening reads meant that almost every time I turned the first page, I was guaranteed a fantastic new experience.

So now I try to only read really great books. As someone once said (I think it may have been Dr Samuel Johnson, though I could be wrong and in any case I'm paraphrasing), life's too short to read bad books. Sometimes I'll be so impressed by an author that I'll read most of their other works, even those considered not so good, but usually somebody capable of writing a masterpiece shows merit in whatever else they've penned. And I sometimes read new books, but I usually wait a few months or a couple of years for any hype to die down so I can see whether it's really worth it. A couple of favourite books of recent years are David Mitchell's brilliant genre-hopping, century-spanning Cloud Atlas and Susannah Clarke's utterly brilliant historical fantasy (yes, I sometimes return to the genre) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not to mention the jaw-dropping, superlative-exhausting, Pulitzer-Prize winning, future-classic The Road by the utterly unique Cormac McCarthy. The last pages of that had me, literally, in floods of tears. It's definitely one of the best books I've ever read, though whether I can put myself through that harrowing experience again, I'm not sure.

I like to mix up my reads so that something heavy and dark, like a novel by Emile Zola or Thomas Hardy, is followed by a frothy, fun experience like the incomparably excellent PG Wodehouse. I may jump straight from a Victorian behemoth like The Woman In White to a modern, cerebral chin-stroker like Ian McEwan's Saturday. I hop from Tsarist Russia in Anna Karenina to a Cold-War paranoid 70s Britain in Graham Greene's The Human Factor. So though I may not be the world's expert on one area of literature, in this way I experience a wonderful panorama of life - lives - across time and space; and gradually I tick the boxes of those 'Best Books Ever' lists periodically published in papers and literary supplements.

Reading is the finest hobby I know. You can do it anywhere, providing you're not supposed to be doing something else! As Groucho Marx said "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." All you need are some printed pages and your own eyeballs to possibly undergo the trip of a lifetime. Television, film and theatre are all very fine - and I'm a fan of the best each of those entertainments have to offer - but nothing can parallel a reader's own imagination. That one-to-one dialogue between a great writer and an attentive reader can be the one of the most scintillating conversations you ever have.

So that's me, and how I choose what I read.

If there's anybody out there, what do you like to read, and why?