Is there nothing I agree with Nicola Sturgeon on, I mean nothing at all? The former first minister sometimes talks about her favourite book of all time and how captivating and inspiring she thinks it is, but captivating and inspiring aren’t the words I would use. The thought of Ms Sturgeon’s favourite book, the memory of it, fills me with dread; I can feel its dreary sentences coming for me after all these years. Please do not make me read it again.

The book in question is Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, which often tops those lists you see of Favourite Scottish Novels probably because when you’re asked to name your Favourite Scottish Novel, you feel like you have to say something like Sunset Song. It’s undoubtedly an important historic novel, and critics and former first ministers say it’s great, and it’s such a cheery thing as well, apart from the suicide, incest, infanticide, and incessant ploughing. But: whatever. I don’t like it. The book that they constantly praise, it says nothing to me about my life.

I’m not saying, so you know, that we should only read books that are upbeat or relevant to our own experiences; some of my favourite books are dark as hell and unlike anything I’ve ever been through. But I am saying that there’s a certain attitude, common among some critics, teachers and middle-class people, that seeks to dictate what we should be reading and forgets that we need to feel a connection to books to start loving them. When I was a kid, they told me: you will like Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn and Robert Burns or you’re not doing it properly. I told them: leave me alone, I’m reading Day of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because the process that worked for me and lots of others – finding a book you love, then another, then another, including........

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