“There are no books too deep for teenagers” said Harry Eyres in a recent Financial Times Weeked Books Section.

He recounts his books like War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago. “There are no books teenagers should read but there are no books too deep or difficult for teenagers. What you read at 16 may shape your imagination for the rest of your life: only the best will do.harry.eyres@ft.comMore columns at www.ft.com/eyres.” Read the article->

Thursday was the UK’s World Book Day (the date is April 23 in other countries), when reading resource packs thudded down in classrooms, every child was given a £1 book token and six specially selected titles could be bought for the same amount. These included the undoubtedly excellent Here Comes Harry with his Bucketful of Dinosaurs. Children and reading have been much in the news following the Royal Society of Literature’s invitation to well-known authors to name 10 books children should read before leaving school. The British poet laureate Andrew Motion’s list was somewhat more daunting than the WBD’s and included such titles as Paradise Lost, The Waste Land and Don Quixote.

As it happens, I read or attempted to read all these books at school, with varying degrees of success or satisfaction. The one I tried earliest, when I was 10 or 11, was Don Quixote. A master at my prep school

named Frank Macadam (who fascinated us with his habit of sneezing snuff all over the breakfast butter pats) was a great Cervantes enthusiast and got very excited when I told him I was embarking on Don Quixote volume one.

I did manage to read a couple of hundred pages but was more or less completely baffled by the tone of Cervantes’s ironic romance. I think Don Quixote is a very grown-up book and not really recommendable to young children, who like their romance less tempered by the cold light of reality. At least, this early exposure had the effect of putting me off the Knight of the Doleful Countenance for several decades.

All the same, I am very much on the side of Motion’s refusal to patronise children and assume they can read only so-called children’s books, or ones that have been graded according to some national curriculum gobbledegook. Some of the greatest experiences of my childhood and adolescence took place in realms of imagination opened by books that were not particularly intended for children.

At the age of 11, I was swept off my feet by Jane Eyre. I found the book incredibly romantic and stirring. Somehow this experience was much more powerful than the intense pleasure of reading historical novels (by Rosemary Sutcliffe and others), tales of horror by Edgar Allen Poe or the epic sweep of Lord of the Rings. Jane Eyre propelled me forwards into the world of adult emotions.

This was a passionate story about love in the real world - that is the world of big distinctions of class, money and status, the world where momentous choices can be made, for better or worse, where tragedy, death and blinding can occur, not to be made better by a magician’s wand.

Three years later I launched myself into a still greater novel, and world - the world of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks (three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of everything compared with the tight Home Counties tameness I had been brought up in.

It wasn’t just physical vastness but emotional and spiritual amplitude. I identified both with the adolescent fervour and freshness of Natasha’s first loves (has any male writer ever been able to inhabit a teenage girl’s emotional world with such insight?) and with Pierre’s struggle to find meaning and identity. Tolstoy’s characters seemed to live human potential to the full, with an intensity even Jane Eyre and Rochester couldn’t match.

After War and Peace (a year or so afterwards) came one of its great 20th century Russian successors, Doctor Zhivago. Here again were war and politics and romance; but perhaps most of all the sense of a good man, and a poet, divided between all sorts of loyalties, to different loves and to different and incompatible ideas of society. This was also a story of sexual passion as an elemental force, beyond good and evil. The account of Zhivago’s last days at Varykino and his grief at his parting from Lara still strikes me as one of the most heart-breaking and truthfully written passages in fiction.

All this makes me sound like a peculiarly moonstruck and romantic teenager. Perhaps I was but other books that moved me profoundly and opened my eyes in those years were Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, for its witness to the brutality of apartheid, the meditative and prayerful poetry of Henry Vaughan, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, with its vision of the marriage of industrialisation and utilitarian ideology, and, in a completely different philosophical vein, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which finds an ineffable value in lives snuffed out by chance and fate.

Perhaps there are no books teenagers should read but there are no books too deep or difficult for teenagers. What you read at 16 may shape your imagination for the rest of your life: only the best will do.harry.eyres@ft.comMore columns at www.ft.com/eyres