Ten books I'm glad that I read

10: Pride and Prejudice

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a 17 year old boy, in possession of his own motorbike, isn't likely to be overjoyed at having to read a book by Jane Austen.

I hated Pride and Prejudice. Rather than read it, I let each word roll past my eyes as if they were items on a conveyor belt in a stultifyingly-boring production line job. In a rare act of rebellion, I wrote a bitterly sarcastic essay about the novel. Rather than beat me about the head with the complete works of Jane Austin, my English teacher said that he was sorry I hadn't enjoyed it. I should put it aside and come back to the book later. Mr Jimmy Anderson, I owe you. I did come back to the book, and everything the 17 year old Steele said about it was wrong.

9: The Thirty-Nine Steps

"Here's a good book, son," said my much-loved grandfather, handing me a Penguin original from a shelf under his television. I have never read anything that captures the Scottish landscape so vividly. When I was stuck in a study room revising for my finals, I'd escape into the outdoors with this book back at my flat. I read other Buchan works and they took me into literary territory I'd never otherwise have visited, including Stevenson and Hogg.

8: Laidlaw

William McIlvanney's Laidlaw is a crime novel and probably set the precedent for the literary Scottish detective story. Like the Thirty Nine Steps, it led me to books I might otherwise never have read. I like detective stories, literary or otherwise. No apologies.

7: 100 Years of Solitude

I simply didn't get this book by Gabriel García Márquez. I didn't enjoy it at all, yet I'm glad I read it. Why? Because people whose opinion I respect say it's great. This leads me to believe that I've still got lots to learn. Perhaps it's Pride and Prejudice all over again.

6: Brave New World

This was on the reading list issued for our Higher English class. I wish I still had that list, because everything I can remember from it has been worth reading. I don't read much science fiction now, but science fiction was the hook that got me into this book and Orwell's 1984.

5: Born on a Blue Day

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet's autobiography gives a remarkable insight into a kind of mind that at first seems very far from typical. Can you recite 20, 00 digits of pi? And yet, what's fascinating is not so much the differences as the similarities - his grief at the death of a pet, for example. Tammet experiences synaesthesia. One manifestation is that he associates different colours with each day of the week. Come to think of it, so do I.

4: Unreliable Memoirs

The first volume of Clive James' autobiography was a great influence on me when I tried to write about my teaching experiences in the TESS. I will never match its brilliance - on describing a large girl landing on top of a small boy after leaping over a vaulting horse, James writes, "She drove him into the ground like a tack" - but it's still something to aspire to.

2= But n Ben a-go-go

When I finish a book, I always take a little time to come out of it, to readjust to the world outside it. Part of me never left But n Ben. It rewired my head. With its use of the Scots language in a future world it changed Scottish literature, and it changed me.

2= And the Land Lay Still

Which James Robertson book to choose? And the Land Lay Still isn't as popular as Gideon Mack, but I think it's even better. No other book that I've read has told the story of Scotland's recent history through characters that I find so poignantly recognisable.

1: Five Go Off in a Caravan

This is number 1 because it was number 1. Aged seven, I was in hospital for a minor operation. My parents gave me this Enid Blyton book because they had just bougyt a caravan and we were about to go off in it ourselves. It was the first real book I'd read and I was astonished. Astonished that someone could create something so engaging and exciting. I was right in there, Julian, Dick, George, Anne, Timmy the Dog and Gregor. The boy in the next bed kept throwing his toy donkey over to me. Briefly stepping out the book, I'd throw it back. He thought I was doing this because it was a game. I was doing it because he'd urinated on it. When life has metaphorically rained wee-soaked donkeys on me, I've always been able to escape into a book. This was the first and whatever I've read of greater worth, I've read because I started with Five Go Off in a Caravan and swung, like Tarzan going from creeper to creeper, from book to book ever after.