Heather Rose

And I remember thinking, oh wow, a book doesn't just take you places, it makes you feel things.

And I thought at the time, I want to be a writer like that.

And then in grade three, our teacher read us The Hobbit.

And every afternoon, if we'd been good, we were allowed to sit on the mat and he'd read to us for about 15 minutes.

So we got left with these terrible cliffhangers of Gollum and Bilbo in the jokes.

There they are down there in the subterranean world with Gollum

and Bilbo vying for freedom.

And, you know, we had to wait until the next afternoon to find out what was the answer to the riddle.

So it was an incredible book, that, to me.

And, in fact, only looking back, I realised it was my first fantasy novel.

And after that, I loved Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker.

It made a big impression on me.

The Americans, a lot of the Americans, Ken Kesey is sometimes a great notion.

That was a big book for me.

Did you go back to read Tom Robbins?

Because some of those books, when you revisit them, they seem very different.

Do they?

I've never gone back.

The book that I go back to every decade that I fell in love with in my teenage years is Anna Karenina.

There's a book about family.