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reading in different languages

I was born in a house full of books. My grandfather was secretary of the Frederik van Eeden^✶ society. One of the aims of the society was to collect and publish the writings of this Dutch psychologist, poet and utopian socialist. My granddad used to proofread, and even in published books he marked printing errors according to proofreaders' conventions. All the walls in his study were full of bookshelves, with mostly Dutch literature. When my teacher in the last year of primary school told us about a Dutch writer, Adama van Scheltema^✶, I knew that he was wrong when he said Adama was a woman. On my granddad's shelves, there was a book by Adama, with the portrait of the author with a dark beard... so I mischievously commented my teachers's mistake with a "Yes sir, a woman with a beard".
In the other part of our house, most books were in French. My father was a Romanist and taught French literature at a teachers' training college. I probably inherited his interest in theatre, in particular in the works of Molière^✶ and his time of ascent of reason - and ascent of the bourgeoisie as well.

As small kids, my sister and I were brought up with the children's stories and poetry of Annie M.G. Schmidt^✶, who represented a fresh breeze among the fables and old wives' tales that were literature for children till the 1950's. On the other hand, my parents held to the view that strips are bad for kids, keep them from reading 'properly'. Nevertheless, there was Bulletje en Bonestaak^✶ from A.M. de Jong, with illustrations by G. van Raemdonck, a series about two kids from Holland and their adventures aboard ships. Our grandparents read them for us, and fortunately, only half the space was taken by the pictures, so there was plenty of text for us to learn to read... Of course, I started buying a weekly strips magazine, Robbedoes^✶ (Spirou), without anybody knowing about it. Later on, there was Astérix le Gaulois^✶, Blueberry^✶, and Corto Maltese (by Hugo Pratt^✶).

The popularity of reading was greatly improved by the invention of the pocket^✶, a cheap 11 by 18 cm paperback book. I bought lots of them as a kid, at about half a euro (20 Belgian francs) apiece. I had a whole collection of Biggles^✶ , the series by W.E. Johns about a team of very British pilots.
Dutch^✶ is the mother tongue of only some 23 million speakers, so books in Dutch are normally quite expensive. This made me turn to English as my preferred language for literature. Penguin^✶ books were easy and cheap, and I would rather read the English original than wonder how to translate backwards some strange construction in the Dutch version...

I'm not into biographies, science-fiction novels, or most of the non-fiction literature. I can digest a travelogue (Redmond O'Hanlon^✶ in Borneo or Congo, or Paul Theroux^✶ around the Mediterranean) and I enjoy some poetry (especially when written by my spouse), but mostly I like novels and short-stories. I particularly like the writings of John Irving^✶ (The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules) E.L. Doctorow^✶ (Welcome to Hard Times) John Fowles^✶ (The Magus), V.S. Naipaul^✶ (essays about India), Isaac Bashevis Singer^✶ (novels and short stories about the Jews in Poland), J.R.R. Tolkien^✶, Patrick Süskind^✶ (The Double Bass -play-, Perfume) and of various Russian (Mikhail Bulgakov^✶, Nicolaj Gogol^✶), African (Chinua Achebe,^✶ Moses Isegawa), Arab (Amin Maalouf^✶), Indian (Vikram Seth^✶), and Japanese (Haruki Murakami^✶) writers. Oh, sorry, forgetting the oldies like the short stories by Guy de Maupassant^✶, the children's tales by Lewis Carroll^✶, and Edgar Allan Poe^✶ for some mystery and macabre... As you can see, the Spanish and Latin-American writers are almost absent! I hope to catch up on them soon.