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My earliest reading memory
The headteacher in my village primary school used to recount terrifying Cumbrian ghost tales to the class, which I’m sure was formative. I can also still hear my mum sing-songing rhymes; “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s”. My dad read the Ant and Bee books to me, repeatedly – he’d drive back over a high upland road from work and get home in time for bedtime stories. But my earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull!

My favourite book growing up
Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien. I can’t remember exactly when I read it, – 13, maybe. It was a definite boom! moment, finding an original heroine. Ann Burden is a resourceful rural girl who has survived nuclear holocaust and has to outwit a male scientist trying to control her. I felt fear, anger and above all exhilaration, because she has agency and courage; she upends dogma and patriarchy. I’ve just given the novel to my daughter as an “inheritance track” and she loves it.

The writers who changed my mind
Angela Carter and Buchi Emecheta issued powerful lessons about female narratives, creativity and life. How not to be submissive or stereotyped. How reactivity becomes proaction. It’s a fine option for a mother to burst in on horseback and shoot the despotic husband of her daughter through the head. If someone burns your manuscript, exit and write it again.

The book that made me want to be a writer
There’s a long line of poets who taught me to love the dynamism of language. (They still do, Kathleen Jamie not least.) Switching that circuit to fiction, I’d say it was Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. It occupies a beguiling middle ground and isn’t concerned with definitions of form. I’d just graduated with an English degree when I read it and was living in the American south. Though the novel is set in 1900s New Orleans, the settings, atmosphere, music and culture felt live.

The book I came back to
I keep trying Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, because everyone wangs on about it. But it never feels psychologically organic enough, and I’ve never finished it.

The book I reread
Ferdinand the bull, again. Every time there’s some appalling machismo surge or political provocation, it revises the idea of strength. To have that amount of muscle and be a non-combatant – beautiful! In the grownup world, James Salter is my lodestar. He doesn’t lay coats over puddles, politically speaking, which is a kind of truth I appreciate. Sentence by sentence his work is exquisite, incomparable.

The book I could never read again
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Glad to have met Jane, but I seem to remember the book was quite whingey (forgive me, Brontë congregationalists). It led me to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which I gladly return to.

The books I discovered later in life
Wolf Hall (plus II and III). I adored Hilary Mantel’s slim, fierce early works, but have a bit of an aversion to historical figure novels with their pre-baked associative publicity. In the case of Mantel – a titan of originality and an occult reanimator of the dead – this was totally ridiculous. It’s a killer trilogy that has created new metaphysics for historical fiction.

The book I am currently reading
Wolves: Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation by L David Mech and Luigi Boitani. Research for a film script.

My comfort read
For years I’d browse a tattered dictionary of lighthouse codes, which identify the unique pattern of signals of every lighthouse in the world. Don’t ask me why, previous incarnation as a mariner, maybe. These days it’s The Little Book of Humanism by Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson. It contains 2,000 years of wisdom in 250 pages, and a clear message: we can make things better.

• Helm by Sarah Hall is published in paperback by Faber on 9 April. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.