Tony Humphreys, psychologist and author
`My mother's mother was an invalid and read a lot and so did my father. At about the age of nine or 10, I loved A J Cronin's books, like Hatter's Castle and Keys of the Kingdom, and Zane Grey westerns. At about 11 or 12, I loved Agatha Christie, books like Cat Among the Pigeons. I was very taken by Hercule Poirot, he was such an unusual detective. I loved classics too, especially Dickens.
"Since childhood, I've been a great novel/detective/western/saga fan, and now I love the Inspector Morse books. But nowadays I read more serious books about psychology, religion and spirituality.
"In my early teens - say, about 13 or 14 - I hated Shakespeare, hated having to read Romeo and Juliet. I was too young, I think, because later I came to love the plays."
David Norris, Independent Senator and Joyce scholar
`THE Grey Goose of Kilnevin by Patricia Lynch wasn't the first of her books that I'd read - that was The Turfcutter's Donkey, in an edition illustrated by Jack Yeats. What I loved about The Grey Goose was the interpenetration of the magic and the real world, the way it made myths, like the Children of Lir, part of my life.
"I identified with Sheila, the girl in the book, and I liked the porky grey goose, who sat and looked sideways at you. If it's not still in print, it should be.
"I've no hesitation naming a book I was forced to read and hated: it was The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. It was heavy, puritanical, it had no pictures; it was forced on me at home on heavy Sunday afternoons. It's a terrible mistake to do that to children, to inflict that kind of book on them. "I was greatly surprised years later, at the funeral of the wife of a colleague of mine, when an extract was read from the book - it was wrenchingly moving."
Susan McKenna Lawlor, Professor of Experimental Physics at NUI Maynooth
`ALICE'S Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was the magic book of my childhood. From the moment one falls with Alice down the burrow of the White Rabbit and lands with a bump on the outskirts of Wonderland, one is embarked on a magical adventure for the imagination. "It is not easy to enter Wonderland, as Alice discovers. One needs to be of the correct size - or as one might say nowadays, to have the correct mindset. But once the key has been found, one is indeed in a wonderland of fabulous personalities. There is the congereel, who comes once a week to teach `drawling' and `stretching' and `fainting in coils', and - in Through the Looking Glass - the Walrus and the Carpenter, who have profound philosophical discussions as they walk along the beach.
"I don't remember when I read it. I was studying elocution and drama at the time, and the teacher decided I should enter the Father Mathew Feis. I was given a blue dress copied from Tenniel, and won a gold medal as a result of being Alice. It became the bane of my life because I had to perform it a lot, and the teacher became ambitious that I should become a film star. She sent me for an audition; my father became incensed and put a stop to all that.
"I was never forced to read anything, so I've picked another book I liked, an anthology of modern verse published in 1929 by Methuen & Co in London. It belonged to my father, and two poems stood out: one was Cargoes, by John Masefield - my father used to take me down to the Alexandra Basin in Dublin - and tell me about the countries ships came from and the other was Yeats's When You Are Old. "Years later, having dinner with the nomenclature committee for craters on Mercury, I suggested that they should name a crater after Yeats. I sent them a book of his poems, and now his name is on a crater."
Robert Dunbar, lecturer in English in the Church of Ireland College of Education and author of anthologies for children
`UNTIL I went to secondary school, I read mainly comics and the like - there weren't that many children's books in the north Antrim town where I grew up. "One book that has stayed with me is one I met at 14, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, which was a prescribed text in school. I loved the atmospheric opening, the larger-than-life characters, but it really came alive for me in chapter eight, where Pip goes for the first time to meet Estella - a meeting set up by her guardian, Miss Haversham.
"Estella is a truly nasty piece of work, and at 14, I hadn't met anyone like her. She goes out of her way to humiliate Pip. I didn't admire him, but understood that she was doing her utmost to keep him in his place. They start playing cards, and he only knows `Beggar My Neighbour' - and Miss Haversham says `Beggar him'. As a young , naive 14-year-old male it taught me to steer clear of a certain kind of manipulative woman.
"And then there are great characters in the book, like Joe, and Magwitch, a wonderful convict figure. It's a wonderful book - and years later, when I taught it for the GSCE in secondary school in Magherafelt, Co Derry, I found myself reliving it.
"I've no problem picking the book I hated: it was a year earlier, when I was 13, and it was my first brush with Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice. My abiding memory is that nothing was ever explained, like why people spoke in verse, and at every line you had to turn to the glossary, and no one, including the teacher, seemed to think that was strange. You had to learn soliloquys off by heart without being told what they meant. "In later life I came to undertand the play a lot more, although I still think it's a very ugly play, because of the way Shylock is treated. The first Shakespeare play I adored was The Winter's Tale, which I read at university - probably because there was no intermediary.
