The books that made me who I am

This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in – skiing, cross-country, kickboxing, even some nature walking along a stream. (I did my last downhill run with Geoffrey Moore, one that ended in a collision with a child at the bottom of the mountain, and I’m thinking of calling it quits on the downhill-skiing front.) The trouble with athletes is that we early on enact the destiny to which we are all subject, an early death. The death of sports talent is a subtle process. The eyes go first, then the step falters. Eventually you feel like an old man who is not in the same league as his opponent. I was lucky to get old late – in sport, that is.

Presently, reading takes up lots of my time, whereas before it was sport and the pursuit of the fair sex. I mostly read history. I rarely read novels – and with very good reason. There’s nothing a novel can teach me nowadays because I’ve seen it all first-hand. And worse, because of my age and experience, at times I can feel the novelist straining, whereas in my teens everything I read in fiction was new and believable. And novelists sure were glamorous back then, tough and terrific. In my young mind they were all heroes. They had no dandruff, they were not pallid, enfeebled weaklings, and they did not scribble neurotic reminiscences about their mother or about being sexually abused.

Let’s take it from the start: after learning the Greek classics and myths as a boy, at 14 came The Catcher in the Rye. I was certain that Holden Caulfield was based on me, as were 300 other boys in boarding school convinced that J.D.