Jonathan Coe: I was a conservative until I read Tony Penn Jonathan Coe

My first memory is reading
Not my first memory of reading, exactly, but my earliest memory of reading with intense enjoyment: The Three Detective Mysteries, a series of children’s books about three juvenile detectives working in remote California (it was magical to me at the time) under the benign direction of Alfred Hitchcock, of all people. I devoured the first 12 in the franchise.

My favorite book growing up
Like everyone else growing up in the 1970s, I had a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on my bedroom shelves – that was the law. I loved it though. Whatever fondness I have for the English countryside probably comes from this book. I remember my grandfather – a real country man – when he saw me reading it and became angry. “A book about rabbits?” – He shouted. “They’re insects!”

The book that changed me as a teenager
Monty Python’s Flying Circus gave me a taste for comedy that deconstructed the conventions of television itself. It never occurred to me that a novel could be satirical in the same way until I stumbled upon a copy of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in the school library. Multiple narratives nested within each other? A group of damaged characters taking revenge on their narrator? I was hooked.

The writer who changed my mind
When I arrived at Cambridge at the age of nineteen, just over a year after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, I may not have been a Thatcherite, but I was still certainly a Tory. Conversations with new friends helped change that, but so did the passion and clarity of Tony Benn’s pro-socialist arguments.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t know exactly what made me want to be a writer (I started at age 8), but I don’t think it was books. Years later, one of the novels that showed me the kind of writer I might aspire to be was Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, with its mixture of biting wisdom and overwhelming melancholy.

The author I returned to
When I was a student, I discovered The Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson in the four-volume Virago edition and decided it was British feminist Proust and it was my duty to read it. Boy, it was heavy. Years later, I realized that you didn’t have to read them completely or sequentially: it might make more sense to take random readings and scoops that reflect the narrator’s floating, unfixed consciousness.

The book I re-read
I’ve lost much of my teenage enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse, but I still occasionally return to his first novel, Peter Camensand. It is a lyrical bildungsroman that combines simplicity (and brevity) with profound moral and intellectual depths, and its evocation of the Swiss, German, and Italian landscape is unparalleled.

The book that I could never read again
In my youthful quest for great comic novels, I remember reading and enjoying Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Returning to it in middle age, I found the comedy overwrought, and the attitudes of its heroes – once considered a breath of fresh air – seemed simply angry and entitled.

The book I discovered later in life
As an 80s film goer, I looked down on Merchant Ivory EM Forster’s adaptations. I now consider them perfect films. A recent review of Howards End led me to the novel that turned out to be – who knew? – To be a masterpiece.

The book is me currently reading
“Borrowed Earth” by Kapka Kassabova (due for publication in April). No other writer’s political acuity matches her response to the natural world, whose despair at the human penchant for greed and corruption is matched by her insistence on the moral necessity of hope. “Writing about nature” doesn’t do justice to her collection.

Read my palm
I believe in the concept of comfort reading. Books can and should challenge us, but they don’t all have to. In times of anxiety and depression, we all need a steam bath from familiar certainties. For me, it comes in the form of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: warm celebrations of male friendship that also happen to be (sometimes perfunctory) detective stories.