The books that helped create other books

Stephen King reads around 70–80 books a year, including bad ones. He reckons terrible writing can be surprisingly educational. After all, somebody else’s mistakes are cheaper than your own.

Roald Dahl enjoyed adventure stories such as Treasure Island as a boy. He later gave children witches, giants and thoroughly unpleasant grown-ups. Clearly, he learnt that a little danger makes a story much more interesting.

Agatha Christie grew up enjoying detective fiction, including Sherlock Holmes. She went on to create Hercule Poirot, a detective who could solve a murder while everybody else was still deciding who should make the tea.

J. K. Rowling loved the imaginative stories of E. Nesbit. Years later, she created Hogwarts, where children learnt magic, teachers kept secrets and nobody seemed particularly concerned about school safety.

Jorge Luis Borges loved books so much that he imagined paradise as a library. Then he became director of Argentina’s National Library when his eyesight was failing. Thousands of books at his disposal, and he needed someone else to read them aloud. Even literature has a cruel sense of humour.

Toni Morrison wanted to read a particular kind of book but couldn’t find it. So she wrote The Bluest Eye. A rather more productive response than complaining about the selection in a bookshop.

The curious thing about writers is that they begin as readers. They pick up other people’s books, absorb their stories, argue with their ideas and eventually produce something entirely their own.

Somewhere in Sri Lanka, a child may be reading a second-hand book that once belonged to a British child.

Who knows what that book might inspire?

And if it turns out to be a terrible book, Stephen King would probably say that’s useful too.

Lanka Books Online — A Little Piece of a British Bookshop, Right Here in Sri Lanka.