The British-American author on arguing about Jane Austen, the joys of Jerome K Jerome, and revising his opinion of Philip Roth

My earliest reading memory
I used to read Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American kids’ series about a boy detective and his brilliant sidekick, Sally, who protects him as they tackle their arch enemy, Bugs Meany, a kind of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We’d sit in the kitchen together and try to solve the crimes. Of course, for me it was also an opportunity to hang out with my mom. I’m one of five kids; attention was hard to come by. But I was also drawn to the picture Sobol paints of small-town all-American life, which I don’t think I ever felt a part of. We moved around too much.

My favourite book growing up
I remember finishing JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at elementary school and already feeling sad about the fact that I’d never be able to read it again for the first time. I have a dim memory that I was in school, because the feeling has something of the flavour of the school hallway and the bright lights on the shiny tiled floors, and the general sense of being shut in for the rest of the day. Some of my older brother’s friends had already introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which shaped the next few years of my life. Most of my favourite novels started with the idea of some lonely figure wandering out into the world to see what the world would do to him. (Later, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers was another favourite.)