For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, my parents gave me The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy when I was about 14 years old. It was a  strange choice for a kid, but it turned out to be a good one for me. I soon discovered a taste for Wessex folk, and for the moors and dales Hardy described so beautifully in his tales. 

Of course, Thomas Hardy novels aren’t always a barrel of laughs, and they probably made a quietly dramatic teenager even more so. But the affinity remained, and now the idea of settling down with The Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess of the D’Urbervilles is almost akin to picking up a book of fairy tales, so closely do I associate them with my youth, when reading was pure pleasure.

I’m recapturing a bit of that pure-pleasure reading this week, dipping into my new holiday books. It’s a feeling Hardy would agree with. “No one can read with profit,” he said, “that which he cannot read with pleasure.”