I grew up with deeply religious parents. No TV, no radio allowed in the bedroom and the only book allowed was The Bible. When you’ve only got one book to read, you tend to read it. I read The Bible. Maybe not all of it, but I read the good bits. The good bits make Games of Thrones look like playschool… only you have to use your imagination. It isn’t given to you in glorious HD but these are the words of God. That’s what I was told and that’s what I believed. How cool was that?

Obviously my friends didn’t think so, so I learned to keep quiet about my night time reading habits.

I took those pithy lines about blood and battles, sex and scandal and built worlds around them. Who were these people who ran around waging war on each other? The heroes and the villains, the whores and the holy men.

The Bible was brilliant but in a way that would have shocked and horrified my mother. What came next was inevitable (masturbation).

Favorite Books
The Bible.