Three major life decisions I’ve made because of books
1) Choice of second language at university
My decision to study Russian as my second foreign language was down to a combination of things. One of those was Mrs. Pearce, a French teacher who covered a few of our A-level classes back in the day. At the time, I was toying with the idea of doing Spanish or Italian, but Mrs. Pearce told me that if I could speak one romance language, I would be able to pick up the others without any real difficulty. She would be proved right five years later when I did eventually start learning Spanish. She advised me to go for something a bit different, something that would make me stand out more. Languages like Mandarin and Japanese didn’t really appeal to me, so it was a case of finding something that did.
It was Kate Furnivall’s novel, The Russian Concubine, that first put the idea of studying Russian into my head. I’d read it a few months earlier and fallen utterly in love with the feisty Lydia Ivanova. Back then, the transcribed lines of Russian dialogue were nothing but collections of random syllables to me. I never seriously imagined that a time would come when they would make perfect sense. Now I can not only understand them; I can point out the places where I would have translated things slightly differently and explain why. The novel was my first foray into Russian history and culture, and…
