During the pandemic my eldest son, then five, and I made a journey stick together thanks to instructions from his imaginative and thoughtful Forest School teacher. Her ability to come up with new outdoor learning ideas week on week kept us both from losing the plot. An aboriginal tradition, it's essentially a way of curating memories in real time as you collect items you find along a walk and attach them to your stick.

I think it’s a rather lovely metaphor for the experiences we gather over the years. The journey stick of my life would be heavily reliant on books. There are those that have been part of the everyday fabric – a means of generating sleep for an over-active mind at the end of the day – and those that have been a refuge when the world outside was crowding in. Seeking solace in their pages was a relief, a distraction and a means of re-establishing equilibrium.

And then there are the formative reads, those books that stay with you. Even if the details of the plot may become a little sketchy with the passage of time you never forget how they made you feel. If an author gives away a part of themselves when they write, then the compensation must surely be that a reader makes room for the lost fragment in their soul. And when it comes to formative reads the residency is indefinite.

I recently referred to a stage of my life – age 13 to 23 – as ‘a very formative time’. I don’t contradict it. I think many people would refer to their teenage years and early adulthood as ‘the formative years’. What I will add is that I don’t think it’s realistic to assume there is only one part of our lives that is developmentally fertile. Major events – parenthood, bereavement, career success or failure, love lost or found – keep our personalities from ever really setting hard.

And so, delightfully, the opportunity to encounter formative reads is boundless. Mine include Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, my A Level set text, and the author’s later work Jude The Obscure which we were advised not to read (so naturally I did). Hardy’s flawed but compelling protagonists were an essential tonic for a teenager struggling with self definition in the at times stifling surrounds of a boarding school with an evangelical Christian ethos.

Atonement by Ian McEwan took up its permanent place in my heart at a similar time. Not because of the individual characters but because of the use of perspectives and narrative structure. The complete set up of the whole novel is, once revealed, absolutely brutal and leaves you in a constant loop of reanalysis wondering what to make of what you've read. It opened up the possibility of reassessment and reframing – of letting go of regret.

Next came Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, read when I was navigating the twilight zone between school and university and on the verge of doing the same thing as the narrator. University was a sea of texts for my English Literature degree, too hard for one alone to sift to the surface when I might as well have set up camp in the library for three years. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Orwell’s 1984 and The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter tried their best.

Travels around South America after university introduced me to the joys of book swapping (something I find hard as an instinctive hoarder of books). On long bus journeys through Argentina and Brazil I read a copy of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini that was well thumbed, water damaged and appeared to be carrying several tropical diseases. I left it on my seat on arrival in Rio, by accident but perhaps there was a greater design.

In recent years Kate Atkinson’s A God In Ruins has continued to sing at me from my bookshelf. I read it before its previously published companion piece Life After Life but feel much the richer for this inadvertent deviation from the author’s chronology. Like Ian McEwan’s Atonement it's brilliantly devised and utterly devastating. You've invested in Teddy Todd, but Teddy is ripped ruthlessly away (as you knew he always would be if you could only admit it).

The shattering of reality and ruination (or at least frustration) of hopes is a theme with my formative reads. David Nicholls’ One Day had me sobbing in the middle of the night and his subsequent works Us and Sweet Sorrow had a fairly similar effect. I don’t think such reads have made me into either a hopeless romantic or emotionally shrivelled cynic – rather simply a believer in the depth of human feeling.

My journey stick is only half full and to know there are many, many more formative reads for me still to discover is an untapped source of joy. Some are part of the literary canon, some are works that may speak only to me. I also love the idea that somewhere an author is pouring their creativity into pages as yet unpublished that will come to occupy a special space in my psyche. I just need to keep walking and see what books I encounter along the winding path.