Which book got Dean Koontz back into reading after an English degree almost put him off

What book … 

Prolific: Dean Koontz has published more than 105 novels

… are you reading now?

Hitler And Churchill by Andrew Roberts. Years ago, Mr Roberts single-handedly renewed my interest in reading history. 

When I am writing a novel, I seldom read fiction for pleasure but turn instead to science or an account of some period of the past.

… would you take to a desert island?

A volume about how to purify sea water into drinking water. But why would I take anything to a desert island? 

If I’m going on vacation, I want to go to a place that provides more to do than repeatedly calculate the number of hours until I starve to death.

My wife and I took a sea voyage for our 20th anniversary and found ourselves in a ­hurricane for five days. We didn’t get ­seasick. Fortunately, however, the ship had a good library.

If we had shipwrecked on a desert island, we’d have enjoyed a choice of reading material until surviving passengers resorted to cannibalism.

… first gave you the reading bug?

Childhood Classic: Grahame’s Wind In The Willows was the first book to get Koontz into reading

As a child, I was swept away by Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows. For one thing, I strongly identified with Mr Toad. All these years later, I still do. What a free spirit! A master of ­disguise! Independently wealthy! 

For the next ten years, I was inspired to read hundreds of novels.

Then the three years I took to complete college as an English major nearly destroyed my love of books.

As an adult, I eventually became an enthusiastic reader again when I discovered the author John D. MacDonald and read 34 of his novels in one month, after which I read everything by Dickens and Thackeray. My dread of literature was cured.

… left you cold?

I confess to finding Ulysses by James Joyce less pleasurable to read than a manual on ­washing machine repair.

I think it is a ­pretentious, misanthropic, ­obscurantist work. I know this makes me a deplorable philistine, a vulgarian, an ignorant capering jackpudding who can’t possibly know which fork to use during a five-course dinner, who makes Lennie in Of Mice And Men look like Einstein.

I can live with that, as long as I never have to reread Ulysses.

The Forest Of Lost Souls by Dean Koontz (Thomas & Mercer, £19.99) is out now.