Which Bloomsbury set writer does Niall Williams have no time for?

I have been working on O NOW!, a series of five linked short stories set in Faha, the fictional village in my last three novels.

To sharpen my focus, I have been reading a lot of short stories – everyone from Claire Keegan to William Faulkner – and am presently in the deep pleasures of the masterful The Best Of Frank O’Connor.

The calamity would not to be on a desert island but to have rescued only one book.

My first thought was Robinson Crusoe or, not being very practical, some version of How To Survive On A Desert Island.

But then the reader in me remembered that I read fiction to be with people, and some of the most passionately alive are in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Each time I would read the 963 pages I would arrive at the famous final paragraph and be uplifted.

I have been reading from as far back as I can remember, mostly library books that were all finished well before the fortnightly visit to the Pembroke Library in Dublin.

But the bug, the incurable one, was almost certainly caught in the classroom of Mr Mason in secondary school, during the out-loud reading of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

The windows were steamed from our breath or blind with rain. Our heads were down. We read with our finger following the words in case we would be chosen to read next, and in this way were joined to the text.

Like no other novel before it, with Great Expectations I left the world and found what was in the pages was more real and compelling than the roads I cycled home.

I have lived long enough to realise that many of my earlier rash judgments had to be revised, when a book I dismissed at 30 was discovered marvellous at 60.

I have yet to come to that revelation with The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I reread Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse last year. Both were better than I first thought.

I couldn’t find the various copies of The Waves I’ve bought over the years, so bought a new one and tried again. Sadly, it seems I’m still not ready for it yet.