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David blogs at Follow The Thread, and is (I think) the only person other than me who attended both the Bloggers Meet-Ups I organised a while ago! [EDIT: Oops, no, he wasn’t!]

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Frances: I did grow up in a book-loving household. A seriously book-loving family. My grandfather and his sister never said no when it came to a book and some of my best memories from childhood are of book shopping expeditions. All those possibilities! I was read to frequently by all members of my extended family but they did take to hiding my favorite book, The Lorax, because I cried every single time when we reached the end and the Lorax picked himself up by the seat of his pants and disappeared through the grey clouds.

David: I’ve always been around books and words, though I don’t think I’d say my household was more book-loving than the average. My father in particular has read books as long as I remember, but I wouldn’t describe him as a true bookworm – I’ve always been the most bookish person in my family. I was read to as a child: the Munch Bunch books were my mum’s main books of choice, and the Mr Men were my dad’s. Richard Scarry’s work was another childhood touchstone – I remember a book of 366 stories and poems, one for every day of the (leap) year.

My reading as a child took in myths and legends, books of obscure or humorous facts, fiction, poetry, and more. Given that, it’s hard to just choose just one book, but I’ve gone for Can You Get Warts from Touching Toads? by Peter Rowan. It’s a collection of answers to kids’ medical questions, such as whether eating bread crusts makes your hair curl, or whether it’s better to run about or fall asleep after Sunday lunch. I had great fun browsing this book, and the Quentin Blake illustrations only added to that (I can still remember one of the grandfather who claimed he could blow pipe smoke out of his ears).

Frances: Every Christmas, my family would listen to a recording of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, and I just loved that. Got it into my head that I could read Dickens when I was much too young to appreciate but I persisted. No wonder that re-reading Dickens as an adult was a completely different experience than those childhood reads. :)

David: Terry Pratchett was my bridge between children’s and adult fiction. I first got into his work through the wonderful animated version of his novel Truckers; moving on to the Discworld books in my mid-teens was a natural progression. There are so many I could choose, but Wyrd Sisters is one of my favourites. The book great fun for Pratchett’s humorous riffs on Shakespeare (“When shall we three meet again?” “Well, I can do next Tuesday”). But it’s also an incisive exploration of one of his main themes as a writer – the ways we use stories to shape the world. For all Pratchett’s success, I think that aspect of his work is significantly underappreciated.

I also have to mention Wyrd Sisters because it was one of the texts I used in my A Level English Language coursework project, comparing the humour in three comic fantasy novels. That was a busy and enjoyable time – and probably one of the first occasions when I really thought about how my favourite books worked.

David: Summer vacations from university were a great opportunity to get some concentrated leisure reading done. In the summer after my second year, there were two large books in particular that I wanted to read. One was China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station; as that’s become the better-known of the two, I’ll concentrate on the other one here. Mary Gentle’s Ash: a Secret History was one of the first books I read because of online reviews: the vast (1000 pages, though it reads quickly) tale of a female medieval mercenary, which proves in time to encompass much more than that. I devoured it in a week and can still remember the experience. (Incidentally, both Ash and Perdido Street Station were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; this was one of the first years I paid attention to the shortlist, which has since become a highlight of my blogging year.)

Frances: A History of Love by Nicole Krauss is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, but I have to say that some of the best reading experiences I have ever had have been because of my blogging life especially with my on-too-long-a-hiatus online book group, The Wolves. We have read the treasured together (Virginia Woolf) and all manner of new things. It is how I came to the infinitely playful Perec, Conversation in a Cathedral and many other wonders. I came to blogging for the conversation and that satisfied the want and then some.

David: Blogging has broadened my reading habits, and helped me to see that what I really like is not a type or genre of book, but a set of qualities that I can find in all sorts of books. I’ve also become interested in reading new literature, and seeing what writers of my own generation have to say. So the book I’m going to choose here is Mr Fox, Helen Oyeyemi’s journey through different versions of the Bluebeard story. When I read a writer like Oyeyemi, I know that the future of literature is in good hands.

David: I don’t really think of myself as having guilty pleasures – if a book is a pleasure to read, there’s a good reason for that, and I don’t see a need to feel guilty over it. Which leaves me with a book that might surprise people…

I’m going to say Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë. I only read it this year, but I’m choosing it because I think it’s a sign of where I am as a reader right now. I’m not as well read in the classics as I’d like to be, and there was a time when I wouldn’t have chosen to read a novel like Agnes Grey. But I really liked it, and appreciated it in ways that I wouldn’t have previously. That’s how I know I’ve grown as a reader, and I hope I will continue to do so in years to come.

David, on Frances’s choices: This reader has chosen a classic ghost story and a work based on Greek myth, so there’s an interest in traditional tales here. Anyone who would choose a Dr Seuss title as a childhood favourite surely loves language. Put the two together, and I think you have someone who appreciates storytelling – it wouldn’t surprise me if this person enjoys the spoken word as well as the written. The Thor comic makes me think of grand, sweeping action; and the Irving and Krauss books tell epic stories about individual lives – so I’d say this person enjoys books with a large or small focus. Definitely someone who’d be interesting to talk books with!

Jodie is better known to most of us as Geranium Cat, and was (I believe) one of the first bloggers I met in person.  Lovely!

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Laura: My mother was an avid reader and always had something on the go. To this day I can picture her curled up in her “reading chair.” She made sure I learned to read before starting school, and took me to the library on a regular basis. I outgrew the library’s juvenile fiction before I was old enough to receive an adult library card, but was given one with a special designation that allowed me to check out all but the most “mature” books.

When I was very young I received several books by Joan Walsh Anglund as gifts, and I adored them. They are small books that fit well in a child’s hand, with very sweet illustrations and titles like Love is a Special Way of Feeling and A Friend is Someone who Likes You. Their central message was all about being loved and caring for others. I remember having them read to me, and then reading them on my own. They were a regular source of comfort, and even now their covers bring back warm feelings.

Jodie: Yes and yes. I adored books and was encouraged and read to by everyone around me. One grandfather read Winnie-the-Pooh and Christmas Carol to us “with voices” and Granny was wonderful both at reading Alice and at making up stories. My favourite book from my early childhood was Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel, about a girl who buys a witch’s cat and has to free him from a spell. It’s the first book I can remember reading to myself, because everyone else was too busy that day. I’m sure learning to read wasn’t quite that straightforward, but it’s a book I still love.

Laura: I read Jane Eyre one summer, I think I was about 12. At that point, this was the longest book I’d ever read. I entered a local bookstore’s summer reading competition, so who knows why I chose such a long book! I remember taking it with me to summer camp, partly because I was enjoying it, but more than anything I wanted to win the competition! I didn’t win, but I did well enough to earn a small gift certificate. And Jane Eyre definitely sparked my interest in classics and made me more willing to approach books others might consider difficult.

Jodie: As soon as I was old enough to go to the library alone I was sent every week (not that I needed encouragement) to choose books for my father to read on the theatre switchboard when there were no lighting changes and, inevitably, I read them too. So I grew up on a diet of crime and science fiction – H.P. Lovecraft, James Blish, John Creasey, Robert van Gulik…I definitely shouldn’t have been reading van Gulik’s The Haunted Monastery at whatever age I was then (probably about 12), I was distinctly shocked by it, but I’ve got it on my bookshelf now, so I think it should get the “first grown-up book” category. Choosing those books certainly shaped my own reading habits though, because I had to be discerning; I couldn’t simply take 4 books off the shelf and hope that they’d do.

Laura: In the mid-1990s, I joined a book group with a lot of fantastic women, all older than me and great role models. One of them introduced me to The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a retelling of the Arthurian legend from a female perspective. At that time, I was just becoming aware of the way history, myth, and legend can differ based on who’s telling the story. Mists sent me off on a period of reading alternative points of view and learning about the often unsung role of women in history.

Jodie: I think that has to be The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because after I read it I became quite obsessed by myths and legends, something which has never changed. Following the trail started by White led to so much other literature, from his contemporaries like Sylvia Townsend Warner to his sources, such as Malory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I love multi-layered fiction, and I think White was my first experience of it. Um, the only thing that’s wrong with this answer is that I read it when I was 12, but it really is the well from which all my interests spring.

Laura: In the recent past I’ve discovered two wonderful authors: Winifred Holtby and Molly Keane, who wrote two books that landed on my list of all-time favourites: South Riding and Good Behaviour. Both are Virago Modern Classics, which have had a profound impact on my reading habits (and my pocketbook)! When I started blogging in 2007, I read a lot more contemporary bestsellers, mixed with some classics but mostly ones typically taught in school. I discovered Virago Modern Classics through LibraryThing, and have been introduced to so many fine women writers I never would have discovered otherwise.

Jodie: The recent favourite is easy – Angela Thirkell’s August Folly, the first of her books that I read. I came to blogging almost through despair – that’s hardly too strong a word. Five years ago I had read everything that I could face on the library shelves, a nauseating cocktail of chicklit, inferior crime writing and poorly-written fantasy. I was utterly miserable but I decided that the Internet must be good for something by then and started looking for recommendations by people who liked the same sort of books as me and bombarding the library with requests for books – oh yes, and buying them. I no longer wait for a good book to come to me by chance, I actively pursue them, as far as I can afford to, and the proportion of newly published books I read has gone down considerably. I still read crime and fantasy, but I can be much more discerning, and I won’t finish a bad book just for the sake of having something to read.

Laura: This is difficult to answer because I don’t usually read for escape, or for guilty pleasure. But since most of my reading tends to be “heavy” stuff, I do need a break occasionally. Then I find that mystery or crime novels, which I rarely read otherwise, can be just the ticket. Most recently I escaped into Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and have enjoyed C.J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mysteries, set in the Tudor period.

Jodie: Well, not exactly guilty, but this one has not only spent the last year on my bedside table, but I regularly take it with me when I’m away from home. It is The Illustrated NFL Playbook, subtitled: “Pro football explained in diagrams, charts and definitions”…I should explain for those to whom the letters “NFL” mean absolutely nothing that this is American football, as mysterious to the uninitiated as cricket (which I loathe, along with virtually every other form of sport I can think of). All I can say in my defence is that it has proved a wonderfully safe topic to steer conversations towards on those occasions when my three large menfolk disagree (sometimes joined, I’ll admit, by me) on quantum computing, or whether pecorino is better than parmesan, or what to do about the Palestinian question. At such times all I have to say is, “Who do you think has the better defensive line, the 49ers or the Bears?” and they’ll be throwing statistics around for hours. The funny thing is, I’ve started to really enjoy it…

And… I’ve told you the other person’s choices, anonymously. What do you think these choices say about their reader?

Jodie, on Laura’s choices: There were two books I didn’t know at all. Googling Love is a Special Way of Feeling by Joan Walsh Anglund shows that it looks very sweet, and ideal for parents to read with their child sitting on their knee – a book for sharing. I’d guess that this is someone who grew up in surroundings where books were treasured. South Riding – Winifred Holtby and Good Behaviour – Molly Keane? Well, I suspect that this person’s bookshelves may have quite a few volumes with dark green spines and probably a collection of Persephones too? And that they probably like secondhand bookshops and would much rather read a book published last century than the latest bestseller. In The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, I think I might detect a fellow lover of myths and legends? Definitely a romantic, at any rate, though, taken along with Jane Eyre, perhaps a romantic with a sense of restraint. Something these books have in common is the strength of their female characters: even quiet Jane refuses the safe option, while Sarah, Aroon and Morgaine struggle against the dictates of their worlds. Finally, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – this is the other book I don’t know, but I think all these choices tell me that this person is interested in how people and relationships work and in the role of woman in society, and is someone who looks for emotional integrity in their reading.

Jane is better known to most of us as Fleur Fisher, and her distinctive style and excellent taste make her a daily must-read.

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Lisa: One of my earliest memories is seeing my mother curled up with a book in a Saarinen Womb chair while my four younger siblings wreaked chaos around her. She had escaped to somewhere else completely and I remember wishing I could follow her! She was a voracious reader and read to me all the time. I had my Enid Blyton phase and my Jean Plaidy phase but it was The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (i.e. Andrews) that clicked on a light bulb for me. The children in the book use “thinking caps” to take them to the fantasyland of the Whangdoodle. It struck me that our imaginations are the only super-powered vehicle we need to make our dreams come true. And that if we work toward something and think positively and don’t give up, there’s no limit to what we can achieve.

Jane: My parents were both readers, and there were always books in the house. Over the years they built up a collection of books that they wanted to keep, and borrowed many others from the library. My baby book records that my first walk was through the Morrab Gardens to the public library. 

I remember being given classics for birthdays and at Christmas, being encouraged to spend my pocket money on books rather than sweets, and regular library visits. Best of all though were the book than my mother had saved, hoping that she would have a daughter to share them with one day.

And the very best of those was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It was a lovely hardback edition, but we’ve read it so many times between us that it is coming to pieces. I wanted a sister, but she never arrived, and so a story of four sisters was quite irresistible. I loved that they were so different and yet they were such a close family. I loved their different stories, and I felt so many different emotions as I watched their lives unfold. It was all utterly real to me – it still is – and I wasn’t at all surprised when I discovered that the book was inspired by the author’s own family.

Lisa: I read Atlas Shrugged when I was twelve partly to be precocious and partly because a friend of my parents had asked me, “Who is John Galt?” and of course I had to find out. A lot of Ayn Rand’s moral relativism went over my head but her strong-willed protagonists were potent role models for a shy middle-schooler whose life resembled The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I think it was the first time I realized that I had a choice in life: I could follow the herd or I could follow my heart. And that if I chose the latter, I needed to stop worrying about what people thought of me and start making my own damn decisions.

Jane: I remember, in my first or second year in secondary school, an English exam with a comprehension test that used a passage from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. I loved his rich, descriptive prose and I picked up a copy of the book from the library not long after. I loved the language, I loved reading about country life, and I loved the story that Hardy span around Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors.

After that I read my way though every book by Thomas Hardy I could find, and I looked closely at anything I came across that was dressed in the black garb of Penguin Classics. The Brontes came next, then Wilkie Collins, then George Eliot. And when I saw a book that looked very similar, but was dressed instead in green, I picked that one up too, and discovered Virago Modern Classics. But that’s another story.

Lisa: Easy. David Copperfield. I read it sophomore year of college and for a long time afterwards, it was my favorite book. It’s all about the triumph of character over circumstance. Dickens tells us, “Look. Life is a struggle, but it’s important to suck it up and keep plugging along because unimaginable joy could be just around the corner. And if things go wrong, it helps if you try to find the funny.”

Jane: When I came home from university for Christmas one year my father told me that he’d bought my mother a book. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman: a big historical novel about Richard III and the end of the Wars of the Roses, painting a more sympathetic than usual picture of the last Plantagenet king of England. I wasn’t at all sure she’d like it. In those days my mother usually read romances and family sagas, historical novels, and I had no memory at all of her reading historical fiction.

When I came home next, for Easter, the bookmark was still just a few pages into the book. Just before I left my mother told me that she didn’t like it at all, but she thought that maybe I would. I started reading on the train back to London and I was smitten. It brought a period and characters I had known little about to life and it brought it home to me that history was rewritten by the winners, that there could be very different interpretations but on the same facts. I’d read a little historical fiction before then, but since then I’ve read a great deal more.

Lisa: I read Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig a few years ago and its intensity still haunts me. I think of Zweig’s writing style as Sigmund Freud meets F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s psycho glamour. In the novel, an innocent act sets off a chain of events which spiral to a horrifying conclusion. The tension is so palpable that it feels like it was written in one long breath. I’ve now read everything he’s ever written.

And yes, blogging has started to change the way I read. Blogs are the 21st century version of a 19th century literary salon. I love hopping from site to site and listening to a miscellany of different voices and perspectives – the mash-up can create some incredible connections. Lately, I’ve been doing the same thing with books. Right now, I’m alternating between Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (dense, fascinating) and Hilary Mantel’s Bring Out the Bodies (a thrill ride). Reading both together feels like a richer experience.

Jane: There was a point in my life, a little over six years ago, when I had to store a lot of my books in boxes in the attic. I decided I needed to catalogue them, so I knew what I had and where it was, and after a bit of looking around I decided that LibraryThing was just what I needed. Not long after I’d started entering books an invitation to join the Virago Modern Classics Group landed. It was wonderful to find that there were so many people, in so many places, who still loved those green books, and those people led me to new books, new publishers, new places to find books. Blogging came a little while later, as I found some lovely blogs when I explored ‘similar libraries’ and found myself wanting to write a little, to fix the books I was reading in my mind.

All of that didn’t so much change my reading habits as make me realise that because there were so many books out there I had to be a little more selective than I’d been in the past. And that it was always worth picking up an unknown title by an unknown author if the book caught my eye, just in case it was a lost gem waiting to be revived by one of those lovely reprint houses.

And that brings me to Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley. I picked it up, from the Cornish fiction bookcase in the Morrab Library, because I knew people with the same name. There didn’t seem to be a connection, but the dust jacket was beautiful and an enthusiastic introduction by Daphne Du Maurier (a friend and neighbour of the author) told me that I had to read it. I found one of those lost gems.

A man and a woman from the north-east were in love, but their situation was complicated, so they ran away to Cornwall. They leased an old army hut and struggled to live off the land, while he wrote a novel. Love in the Sun is fact rewritten as fiction, honestly, thoughtfully and beautifully written. It was out of print when I read it, but I was thrilled to hear from the Walmsley Society that they now have it back in print, in a very nice new paperback edition.

Lisa: I am starting to feel guilty that I might be too insistent that my friends read Beverley Nichols. His Merry Hall memoirs are so wickedly funny. Beverley writes like he’s Noel Coward lost in a P. G. Wodehouse novel and I want to live in every house he ever writes about. If I’m feeling clever-deficient, I read a few pages of him and my wit comes snapping back.

Jane: I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. Books can offer so many different things, and I think the trick is picking the book that offers what your head and heart need at any given moment. And if sometimes that’s great literature and sometimes its chick lit, so be it. I’m not sure what might be surprising either, because I can see a thread that runs through pretty much everything I read.

But maybe this is the time to confess that I sometimes read to Briar (my border terrier) from The Dastardly Book for Dogs by Rex and Sparky. Santa Claus left it for her a few years ago and she has learned a great deal from it. How to pick a pill out of peanut butter; what to do during a thunderstorm; building a bed out of your owner’s laundry; the formal rules of fetch; making toys out of household items …

Jane, on Lisa’s choices:My initial reaction was that I have no idea, and that I don’t think we’ve ever crossed paths.
Then I thought a little more and I decided:
1) This is someone who is very purposeful, and not afraid of hard work.
2) This is someone who lives in a city or a big town, not in the country or by the sea.
3) This is probably a cat person rather than a dog person.
but it wouldn’t surprise me at all of I’m wrong on all counts.

Lisa, on Jane’s choices: How fun! Let me put my Miss Marple hat on…and away we go. First of all, Little Women suggests someone who understands the struggle between family devotion and the desire to be independent and live your own life. With Love in the Sun, I’m envisioning someone who is passionate about adventure and life’s simple pleasures. Including The Sunne in Splendor with its empathetic perspective of Richard III makes me think this person doesn’t rush to judgment and has faith in the power of redemption. He/she also possesses a great sense of humor about the absurdities of modern life (The Dastardly Book for Dogs) and has a deep and haunting empathy for the vagaries of human nature (Far From the Madding Crowd).

So to recap: This person is fair-minded, optimistic and always gung-ho for adventure, has a keen sense of the absurd, a deep passion for domesticity and family and looks on life’s tribulations as being exciting opportunities for personal growth. Who says the perfect person doesn’t exist?!

Florence blogs at Miss Darcy’s Library, and I am grateful to her for getting me finally to read some Rosamond Lehmann, after she led a Reading Week devoted to this author earlier in 2012.

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Stu: I did very much grow up in a bookish house. My earliest memories are of my dad reading on the chair, in the car waiting for my mum, and his hour long visits to toilet at home with his book reading! That said our tastes in books are very different – my dad is an escapist reader, thrillers westerns and spy novels. He also reads maybe double the number of books I do.  My grandparents were also very bookish – my gran was a crime fan so holidays were spent reading but also looking through her collection of old paperbacks with their slightly creepy sixties and fifties covers.  Her favourite writer was Agatha Christie.  My other gran was an English teacher and headmistress so her shelves open my eyes to classics and although I don’t read as many as I should these days, I discovered names like Saki and Dickens in her shelves. Also she maybe inspired one of my favourite childhood books, which is The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, as she had a old version of The Lord of the Rings that I found very enticing as a kid with its cover and Runic writing – so I was given The Hobbit when I was about ten as The Lord of the Rings was maybe too had for me at that age. I fell in love with the idea of far away places and adventures in them.

Florence: I grew up in a diplomatic household, and every two to three years we’d up stakes and move to another country. It was difficult keeping up transatlantic friendships, and I learnt early on to rely on books rather than people for comfort and companionship. It helped that wherever we lived, there were always books all around us. Every night after dinner my siblings and I gathered on my parents’ bed for story-hour, and my mother read aloud from all the great classics. When we grew too old for children’s books she swapped them for Jane Austen, Margaret Mitchell, or Tanizaki. It was only when I finished high-school and moved to Paris that the tradition finally – sadly – came to an end.

If I had to pick one book from my childhood (oh how hard it is to choose!), it would probably be E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. I was very keen on tales of magic and adventure, and I read and enjoyed a great many of them, but only The Enchanted Castle had statues that came alive in the moonlight, and an invitation to dine with the Greek gods on an island in the middle of a lake!

Stu: I always say my first truly grown up book… well I have mentioned The Hound of the Baskervilles in a post on my own blog, but maybe I’ll mention another book I read around same time (that would be about fourteen or fifteen) that maybe gives a clue to my later reading tastes, and that is The Plague by Albert Camus.  A dark book about how people react when a plague breaks out and I, in a way, associate with this as my parents had got divorced in my early teens and my mum remarried and I gained a brother and sister and a step father who I didn’t and still don’t get on with. So a book about people struggling with life maybe rung home as my teens years weren’t the happiest for me, in reflection, as I never felt at home in my late teens so writers like Camus then the beat writers gave me a outlet on my life. Damn that sounds depressing but it has affected the rest of my life.  There were of course good times but as a growing teen I felt alone at times and angry at the world.

Florence: I was twelve when I first read Jane Eyre. I tried Pride and Prejudice first and found Austen so dry that I gave up at the end of the first page, vowing never to open the book again (luckily, I have gone back on that vow multiple times since then!). We were living in Cape Town at the time, and I vividly recall the sunshine pouring into my bedroom and the way I leaned over and put P&P back on the shelf, with a small but decided plunk. For some peculiar reason, that is the image that has stayed with me, rather than the drum-roll moment when I first opened Jane Eyre. And there should have been a drum-roll! For I fell utterly, irremediably, head over heels in love with Jane and Rochester. It was the first time I met a heroine who was neither a princess nor the most beautiful girl in all the kingdom – and yet, poor, obscure, and plain as Jane was, she was wonderful! So full of fire, and so unquenchable… She and Rochester are still my favourite literary couple.

Stu: Well, early adulthood saw me leave Cheshire where I grew up and move to Northumberland where my dad and step mum had relocated.  Still angry, I ended up eventually living in Germany with a German girl. At this point my angry young man part of my life had come to its end really, and I asked my dad as he came over to Germany to visit to bring some books over from the wonderful Barter Books.  So my dad, the escapist reader, brought half a dozen books, a couple of which were books in translation by German writers as I was in Germany. One of these was The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse – a coming of age novel about games of intelligence and maybe living outside the world just for intellect.  Now, how to bring this into my own life… well, as many of you may know or may not I support people with learning disablities and have done since I returned to England nearly twenty years ago. I do this job because I love to see the people I support achieve things and have found my personality is suited to this job: I’m very patient and a great reader of people’s emotions and a good listener, so I know how to help the people I support. Anyway I’m sure there is a link between Hesse and my job!

Florence: As a teenager I was very fond of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, which I always preferred to the Anne of Green Gables series. Emily was so much more mysterious than Anne, and I loved New Moon and the aunts. In fact, though I couldn’t have put it in so many words then, the Emily books – and especially the last one, Emily’s Quest – appealed to me because it combined everything that is most important to me: a quaint old house, a large and eccentric family, and writing. That’s always what bugged me the most about Anne Shirley: she was a failed writer. And she accepted that. Whereas Emily never gave up. She was going to be writer whether people liked it or not! I wanted to be like her – and I still do..

Stu: Oh I’m going to twist the rules here and pick a publisher, if I can Simon, I want pick Peirene Press. I have loved all the books in the last few years, and as you may know they publish books in translation that have been called movie books because they take a couple of hours to read. But the main thing I love about them is, yes, they are short, but every book they have published has felt so much more than its size and if it wasn’t for Meike the publisher, they wouldn’t reach us in English. So yes, they were the first publisher to send me a book for the blog but also the reason the blog is here to highlight books in translation.  I hope that is ok – if you need to push me I’ll name Stones in a Landslide as my favourite book by them but it is like picking your favourite child.

Florence: It was my best friend who pushed me to start a blog: it amuses him when I get all worked up about a book and do my best to get him to buy my latest favourite. Because he lives far away in the States, opportunities for heated debates about books are not as frequent as we would like, so he suggested a blog as a way of getting around that… And I am very glad he did! Apart from the many lovely blogs that I’ve come to know, and the countless fascinating titles I have added to my TBR list, I would never have discovered A. S. Byatt or Mary Stewart if it weren’t for blogging, and they both (albeit in very different ways) make my life much happier!

Paradoxically, though, blogging has slowed me down: I have trouble starting a new book until I’ve reviewed the one I’ve just finished, and because I take forever to write up my reviews, I actually read less now than I did before. Moral of the story: be organized and don’t procrastinate!

Stu: Oh guilty pleasure – I think I may have mentioned this on the blog before but it is dog biographies, books like Marley and Me.  Damn, that is my credibility gone now there! No, the truth is the blog is named after my own dog Winston and I just enjoy a bit of escapism reading a story of a dog’s life, although usually get upset at the end and I can’t even watch the film Marley and Me without crying loads. I just love dogs – man’s best friend and in my case they have often been my best friend over last twenty years, well til I met my darling wife

Florence: No surprises in store for anyone here! I think my tastes in books are a pretty accurate reflection of my personality. There isn’t much guilt involved either – I would perhaps refrain from mentioning my enjoyment of Georgette Heyer novels in certain academic circles, but all in all, I don’t think one ought to be made to feel guilty about reading, whatever one might choose to read. As a matter of fact (since the truth will out!) my guilty pleasure is watching American TV series, such as Friends and Gilmore Girls. Hmm. Please don’t hold it against me! 

Florence, on Stu’s choices: This was a fascinating list of titles to analyse! Though judging a person by what they read as a child is not exactly foolproof, I think that in this case, the choice of The Hobbit is very telling: it points towards an imaginative and adventurous mind – a trait the other titles tend to confirm. For the adolescent reader’s forays into French and German literature (Camus and Hermann Hesse), and the adult’s appreciation of the Peirene Press‘s very diverse European publications, reveal an open, curious mind and a desire to explore beyond the confines of the English literary canon which seem in perfect accordance with the child’s love of Bilbo Baggins’s adventures through Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains. Lastly, I think my mystery reader probably has a soft spot for animals, a kind heart and a sense of humour, or they wouldn’t like Marley and Me so much. Definitely someone I’d like to meet!

Margaret is the nearest thing I have to a blog twin, since she started Books Please just two days after I started this blog!  She very kindly provided her own photos for her Life in Books.

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Tanya: My mother was (and is) a big reader – when I was a child, she would regularly announce that she was going upstairs to “tidy up”, which actually meant “sit on the bed absorbed in a Georgette Heyer”. She read to me all the time, took me to the library and generally encouraged me to read. An early storybook favourite was Pierre Bear, a story about a hunting bear who in the course of the text dispatches a seal and a moose, which he turns into ‘thirteen jars of minced moose meat’. This may account for my conversion to vegetarianism at the age of six. The childhood favourite I’d like to pick, though, is Enid Blyton’s In the Fifth at Malory Towers. This was given to me when I was about eight and I found it wonderfully exotic – dormitories, lacrosse and midnight feasts were symbols of a completely alien world – but totally engrossing. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t read the others; Enid Blyton’s characters are never really that complex and I quickly worked out who was who. Best of all, it was one of a whole series of books – I could read all about the earlier schooldays of Darrell, Sally and Alicia (the latter was always my favourite). This was the first book that really allowed me, as a reader, to enter and experience a new imaginative world; and I suspect it shaped my taste for interwar fiction in later life.

Margaret: I did grow up in a book-loving family. It was my dad who read to me and made up stories as well and it was my mum who took me to the library each week. I don’t remember my dad reading many books, but my mum always had one on the go. Birthday and Christmas presents always included books and my aunties also used to give me books. I had my own bookcase that my dad made for me.

One of my childhood favourites is Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll.  My Great Aunty Sally gave it to me and I must have read it many, many times, loving the story and the illustrations. It actually sets a chess problem and although that is set out in the opening pages as I didn’t know anything about chess I didn’t bother with that and the story made absolute sense to me without understanding the chess moves. When I say sense, it is of course a nonsense plot, peopled with chess pieces and nursery rhyme characters, plenty of word games and puzzles, with bits of logic and philosophy thrown in. I loved it as a child and I love it now.

Tanya: When I was thirteen, I went to Germany on a school exchange, and woefully underestimated the number of books I’d need to take. My hosts all spoke good English and there were a few English novels about the house; the one I picked up was The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie. I’d never read a crime novel before and although I must have read other ‘grown-up’ books by this time, this is the one I remember best. Perhaps this is because I was in an alien (if friendly) environment, and Christie’s book took me back to the English village I’d left behind. Miss Marple, that insightful spinster, was also a personally reassuring figure: I had a lot of clever, unmarried great-aunts. The plot of this novel hinges on the truth that lies underneath appearances; with hindsight this seems to be a perfect text for the adolescent me, looking grown-up but not really feeling it..
 

Margaret: It’s hard to remember which book that would be. It was either Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice. I think it’s most likely to have been Jane Eyre because I remember watching a TV dramatisation at a friends house (we didn’t have a TV then) and being scared by the mad woman and I can still visualise the scene where she sets the house on fire. My mum had a copy of the book and so I read it, still scared by the mad woman but enthralled by the story. I don’t think much was going on in my life at that time apart from school and Girl Guides.

Tanya: So hard to choose only one, but here goes: Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, which I picked up randomly and read devotedly and repeatedly when I was about seventeen. If you don’t know the book, it’s the story of Katherine, a young Londoner, and her relationships with the family of her ebullient philosophy professor, Jacob Goldman. I loved the narrative style of this book, which is all told in first person but switches about between past and present tense. I loved the sophistication of it, and the way that sophistication is mediated through Katherine’s naivety. I loved the unflinching way that the novel deals with pain. Most of all, though, this book showed me that there were other ways to live – that there was a big and complex world outside of sixth form and that I could get out and explore it, although my life turned out nothing like Katherine’s. I’d also never read a book with so much swearing in it which was strangely liberating. My paperback copy of this fell apart after a year or so of obsessive re-reading, and my colleagues at the bookshop where I worked kindly gave me a hardback which I still have. I still love Barbara Trapido, too.

Margaret: I don’t think any book has helped me ‘set off in a certain direction in life’, because most of the books I’ve read were as a result of my interests rather than the other way round. In my early adulthood I didn’t read as many books as I did as a child, nor as I do now.

There is one book that I first read as a teenager that is still a favourite – Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. When I was at Library School in my early twenties, it was ‘the book’ to read and talk about and I re-read it at that time and again later on several times. It’s such a satisfying book to read on a variety of levels. It’s fantasy, magic, myth, an epic tale about friendship, heroism and the fight between good and evil. It’s beautifully poetically written, with its own historical background, language and culture. It’s a page-turner, about a quest with a multitude of characters facing enormous perils and twists and turns that never fails each time I re-read it to entrance me. I suppose in some ways it’s a continuation of the fairy and fantasy tales I read and loved as a child, brought into the adult world.

Tanya: I’m going to pick Roger Deakin’s Waterlog which I read in 2009 and which was not only a pleasure in its own right but led me on to read a lot more nature and travel writing. Deakin’s book is everything I like in non-fiction: incredibly expert but always interesting, diverse in content but consistent in theme, related to personal experience, and most of all beautifully written. Other book bloggers have opened up this type of writing for me and it’s often from them that I’ve gleaned recommendations for writers like Robert MacFarlane and Kathleen Jamie. I love this type of writing because it sharpens and focuses my attention to the world I’m in, however mundane; it makes me look. It’s also gloriously separate from the sort of thing I read for my PhD. I started blogging partly as a warm-up for my PhD, to get my critical skills in gear, and partly because I wanted a space to think and reflect on whatever I chose to read, PhD-releated or not. I think I re-read less as a result of the blog – partly because I want to read new material to write about, and partly because other bloggers’ enthusiasms have enlarged my to-be-read list vastly.

Margaret: How hard to choose just one favourite book! But one book does stand out – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It is of course, historical fiction, one of my favourite genres and it also stands out because it’s written in the present tense, which I normally avoid like the plague. However, even with this stumbling block and her slightly confusing use of the pronoun ‘he’, Hilary Mantel had me completely enthralled in this story of Thomas Cromwell. What I found most enjoyable was the way this book transported me back to that time, with Mantel’s descriptions of the pageantry, the people, the places and the beliefs and attitudes of the protagonists.

Blogging has most definitely changed my reading habits. I now read more carefully, although I’m still guilty of reading too fast and forgetting what I’ve read, but thinking about what to write about a book makes it so much more memorable. It’s also changed what I read. I now read much more widely than I did before, and it has introduced me to so many new-to-me authors and has taken me back to reading crime fiction, a genre I’d practically ignored for years.

Margaret: Another difficult question, because I read quite widely, and have written on my blog about most of the books I’ve read over the last five years. But I rarely write about books on religion, even though I’ve read many books on Christianity and other religions ever since I was a teenager. One that I like very much is Karen Armstrong’s memoir The Spiral Staircase. Actually I like all the books by her that I’ve read, mainly on comparative religion. The Spiral Staircase is her account of her early life as a nun and traces her spiritual journey after she left her teaching order. It’s a sequel to her first autobiographical book, Through the Narrow Gate and is about her recovery from illness, panic attacks, seizures and depression, about her efforts to come to terms with the ‘real world’, and about her changing faith and her search for God.

Margaret, on Tanya’s choices: I’ve only read the first two of theses books. I loved Enid Blyton’s books and nearly chose one as a favourite childhood book. And I’m a big Agatha Christie fan. So we started off in life with similar tastes. After that we diverge, and I’ve had to find out a bit about the books to make any comment. This person is probably someone who is younger than me, because he/she has chosen Brother of the More Famous Jack as a book read in early adulthood. I see it’s defined as ‘redefining the coming-of-age genre’, so it looks a good choice for a young adult.

I am interested in reading Waterlog, which I haven’t heard of before, even though I’m not too keen on swimming. A swimmer’s journey through Britain indicates an interest not only in outdoor swimming and in Britain but also in natural science, history and geography, which also interest me. Or, maybe this person is a keen swimmer? Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh is also an interesting choice, indicating a liking for twentieth century writers and social history. Overall, this is an eclectic reader.