But I remember a period of about three weeks, the summer I turned 19, when I read Moby-Dick and then The Odyssey for the first time, and those two books left me in such a state of euphoria there was probably no turning back. Narnia and Enid Blyton were definitely worlds I got lost in, but I don't think I was much of a reader when I was growing up: I was more excited about TV and cricket and pop music. And it does feel like a miraculous sort of cascade or torrent of characters, images, perceptions, conversations and brilliant flights of language, as Augie barrels round Chicago, Canada, Texas, Mexico and Europe in search of an adequate fate - a life that's appropriate to the person he is. Bellow said that the book came easily to him: 'All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it'. Saul Bellow's The Adventures Of Augie March. She's intelligent, curious, tender, generous, and alive to the world around her, but none of this is enough to stop history closing in: Berr and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz she was killed in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. And I'm also reading Hélène Berr's Journal - the diary of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris from 1942 to 1944. It's about a man trying to find equilibrium and steadiness in the midst of great turbulence - addiction, breakdown - and there's a quiet musical eloquence to every page. Waking Up In Toytown, the wonderful second volume of autobiography by the poet and novelist John Burnside.
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