Andy Griffiths has written more than 25 children's books and over the past 20 years they have been New York Times bestsellers, adapted for the stage and television, won more than 50 children's choice awards, and in Australia and New Zealand have sold close to five million copies. His new book is The 52-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan).
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
STRUWWELPETER
Dr Heinrich Hoffmann
My grandmother had a copy of a 19th-century German children's picture book of stories about children who ignore their parents' advice and end up maimed or dead. Did it stop me from playing with matches or sucking my thumb? No. Did it make me fall in love with reading and the thrill of not knowing what's going to happen when you turn that page? You bet.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND/THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Lewis Carroll
The ruthless and wide-ranging absurd comic logic of Lewis Carroll inspired The Goon Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus and a heap of appalling movie adaptations which will never capture the singular originality and deep silliness of this wonderful and paradoxical book.
THE FARAWAY TREE BOOKS
Enid Blyton
I loved Enid Blyton because I could always trust her to get rid of the adults and get the children into an exciting and often dangerous situation (with a minimum of time-wasting or description). In particular I was fond of the wonderful, mysterious and seemingly unlimited world of The Faraway Tree. Populated by strange and often cantankerous characters such as the Saucepan Man, Dame Washalot and the Angry Pixie, the tree featured an endlessly changing roster of pleasant and unpleasant magical lands at the top.
METAMORPHOSIS
Franz Kafka
This is the first line of Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." This is the first line of The Day My Bum Went Psycho: 'Zack Freeman woke out of a deep sleep to see his bum perched on the ledge of his bedroom window." Coincidence? Or clumsily bowdlerised homage? Obviously the latter, but the utterly matter-of-fact way Kafka relates the extraordinarily surreal dilemma of Gregor Samsa hit me like a freight train as a teenager and, later, gave me a big clue about how to write humour.
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
J.D. Salinger
This novel is still as funny, sad and, occasionally, as shocking as it was back in 1950. Although it expresses the author's disillusionment with the world, the character of Holden Caulfield is so alive and compelling that I have to remind myself he's just a character in a book and not somebody that I used to know or, for that matter, be.
