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Claire: My love for books and for reading was instilled in me from an early age, mainly by my mother and grandmother.  I loved being read to and I was one of those children who always knew (and objected!) whenever the reader skipped over a part or mixed up the words.  The two picture books that stand out in my memory are Mog’s Christmas by Judith Kerr and Dogger by Shirley Hughes, both written by stalwart children’s authors who have endured.  Mog’s Christmas was the second outing in the famous series and concerns Mog the cat’s unsettled reaction to Christmas; I’m a huge fan of Christmas and cats and I like to think that Mog’s Christmas contributed to that. Oh, and I loved the book so much that my grandparents had to rename their kitten Mog!  She was as much a part of my childhood as the book was and died when I was fifteen years old. 

Dogger, like Mog’s Christmas, wasn’t exactly a happy story and I wonder if my love of sad stories that end happily says something about my reading preferences…  Dogger is the eponymous toy dog who is lost and found again; however, it is also a heartwarming tale of a sister who sacrifices her own toy for her little brother’s happiness.  I loved, loved, loved it.

Nymeth: I did grow up in a book-loving household, though my parents never really had the habit of reading to me.  I confess I feel slightly envious when fellow book bloggers share their memories of being read anything from The Lord of the Rings to Dickens to Jane Eyre as bedtime stories!  But to give my parents the credit they deserve, they led by example: they were always plenty of books around the house, and I would always see them reading.  So from a very young age I learned to associate reading with something adults did for enjoyment, and I very much wanted to do it myself.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a huge childhood favourite of mine.  I first discovered it through the Japanese animated series from the 1980s, which was on TV a lot when I was little.  I asked my parents for the book, and for many years I reread it every six months or so.  I had no idea Twain was one of the great American novelists then – I just loved his book for its sense of adventure and possibility and for Tom Sawyer’s endless mischief.  I would love to revisit it one of these days, along with the more critically acclaimed Huckleberry Finn.  I must have been 13 or 14 when I last read them, and have no idea what they’d look like to my adult eyes.

Claire: I read a lot of older books before I was really supposed to.  I had access to libraries and voraciously read anything; I also remember devouring my grandmother’s library books too, books by Catherine Cookson, Lena Kennedy and Barbara Taylor Bradford just because they were there.  However, I also encountered classic novels during my binge years and read The Catcher in the Rye at ten years old (way too young to understand it) and Jane Eyre at eleven (I adored it; I did not adore studying it my first year at University).  Either of those answer your question but I think it was really reading Rebecca when I was fourteen that was the first ‘grown-up’ book that shaped me as a reader and determined the type of books I sought out from that point onwards.  It remains a favourite.  My mum bought it for me on a holiday to Ireland to visit family and I cherished -and still do- that copy although it is battered and well read and re-read.  I was a bookish teenager who didn’t fit in at school and was, at that stage, going through a particularly bad bout of being bullied; I had always escaped through fiction but Du Maurier  thoroughly immersed me in Manderley and its goings on that I didn’t want to leave.  It took me until last year to read a second Du Maurier novel because I loved Rebecca so absolutely that I couldn’t have anything taint those memories of being found – as opposed to lost – in literature… I need not have worried.

Nymeth: Probably one of George Orwell’s most famous novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.  I read them a few months apart, but I can’t really recall which one came first.  I also can’t remember what was going on in my life at this point, though funnily enough I have very vivid memories of lying in my bed in the afternoon and reading these novels.  I must have been in seventh or eight grade, and I remember feeling all clever and grown-up and proud of myself for understanding Orwell’s allegory in Animal Farm and grasping at least some of the political subtext that informs the dystopian world in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  I also felt very satisfied with myself for having picked up these novels on my own (I didn’t grow up in an English-speaking country, so we didn’t study them in school).

Of course, looking back now I see that the power of Orwell’s novels doesn’t exactly lie in their subtlety.  Laura Miller says in The Magician’s Book that these are great stories to “cut your critical teeth into”, and I can see what she means.  They’re pretty transparent but no less satisfying for it, and so they can easily make young readers feel confident that they can understand metaphors and allegories and tease out political themes in more complex literary works.

Claire: I couldn’t discuss my life in books without mentioning Angela Carter as she has been a huge influence.  I read Nights at the Circus as a set text in my final year of university (so, my twenties and “early adulthood”) and enjoyed it more than any other book I read while studying (and that’s saying something as I first read Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Salman Rusdie and many more while at uni).  The richness of language, the literary allusion, the fervour of her storytelling and how she is unrelenting in her creativity and passion… yes, I was an immediate fan. 
A year later I had read her back catalogue and was writing my Master’s thesis on aspects of her work.

Nymeth: I don’t often remember to list it among my favourites, but Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning was important to me because it sparked my interest in the Victorians and, obliquely, in gender studies.  I’m not sure if I’d say it helped set me off in a new direction in life – I didn’t go on to study any of these things in grad school, for example, though I did consider it.  But the novel opened up a new world for me, and the readings that followed from that help shape my thinking to this day.

Claire: The Group by Mary McCarthy is a favourite from the last five years but there have been several… that one wasn’t one I found through blogging although it was an early read in my blogging career and one I am glad I have been able to share with fellow bloggers.
Blogging and reading of blogs has been an enriching experience but it also changed the way I read.  The wealth of recommendations, challenges (especially literary prize list reading) and books for review was a lovely by-product of blogging but it was also overwhelming… I found it important to return to my roots as a reader and read more on a whim rather than have hype or deadline dictate my reading.  I am enjoying my reading again (reading is never fun when it becomes a chore) and every so often allow myself to be led by the enthusiasm of another blogger into my next book read or purchase.  I have always been an eclectic reader but think I have become more discerning of my own preferences since I returned to making my own reading choices again.

Nymeth:  Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which I might never have picked up if not for book bloggers, and which I’d certainly have read out of order if not for bloggers – I was rescued from that horrific fate at the very last minute!  I know this might sound clichéd, but blogging has done a lot to expand my horizons over the past few years.  The more time I spend in the virtual company of other bookish folks, the more my interests widen.  And this is something for which I’m incredibly grateful.

Claire: Nobody can survive – or be sustained – on a diet of one type of book alone… I tend towards rich, hearty literature and that’s just not healthy so sometimes I have to indulge in some low-calorie popcorn reading too!  I love some easy reading fantasy series reading, whether it be on the epic scale of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series or Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire (Sookie Stackhouse) series, things that I can snack on between meals but that sate me for a while.

Nymeth: I hate to be a spoilsport, but I don’t really believe in the concept of guilty pleasures :P  I think people have come to expect my blog to be an amalgamation of interests that don’t often go together, so I’m not sure what would be surprising.  I guess there’s The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.  I was obsessed with it in my teens and memorised entire passages.  It’s one of those books that helped make me who I am, but because all of this happened pre-blogging people are unaware that I’ve even read it.

Sakura: I grew up in a house filled with books, both my parents read a lot and my father wrote.  Although we never received pocket money, we were allowed to buy as many books as we wanted.  I don’t recall my parents reading to me though and my first memories are of me flicking through my mother’s book on Botticelli from her art school days.

One of my favourite childhood books is Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield, about three orphaned girls taken in by an eccentric explorer and his niece who dicover the meaning of life, love and family through ballet.  I was quite tomboyish as a child and always wanted to learn ballet.  There was something so romantic about it and I would enviously watch as my neighbourhood friend went to her ballet lessons.  However, the book itself dealt with a lot of adult themes such as the loss of family, financial worries, the sacrifices involved in the pursuit of dreams and how values change as you grow up.

Danielle: I do come from a family of readers, though I seem to have surpassed the rest of my family in terms of having a serious book addiction.  I read far more books throughout the year and I seem to acquire them faster than anyone else in my family.  Although I don’t recall being read to (I must have been read to as a very small child), my mom always took my sisters and I to the library, which is probably where my lifelong love of libraries began.  My mom also worked in an elementary school library and would occasionally take me with her to work, which was always a special treat.  She would often bring home books to share and I still have vivid memories of some of them. 

One of my very favorite books as a child is one I owned, however.  I would spend hours poring over Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?  Although there is text, it was the illustrations that set my imagination in motion.  Inside the pages of this book is a city teeming with life.  Each building depicted is a cutaway so you can see inside and imagine all the different people and the jobs they do and the places they go.  The book is so colorful and with so many small details it every time I would look at it there was something new to see in the pictures. 

Sakura: The first grown-up book I read was probably Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links when I was nine.  I think I found the book in my Sri Lankan grandparents’ house when I was visiting on holiday.  The book probably belonged to one of my aunts or uncles but I ‘borrowed’ it and it has remained one of my favourites – I still have it at home today.  We were living in Bangkok during the 1980s where I attended a British school and lived the expat life, mixing with children from a lot of different countries.  I remember spending an inordinate amount of time in Asia Bookstore near our flat going through all of Christie’s mysteries I read and wanted to read.

Danielle: Not only did I always have easy access to books when I was young, but I was allowed to pick and choose as I liked.  I didn’t have a lot of guidance when it came to picking books and this was both good and bad.  It was good to be able to choose books based on whim and fancy – whatever simply sounded appealing I would read – but it also meant I missed whole swathes of literature that so many other young adults had pressed into their hands by more mature readers.  I wish I could say I had discovered Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice or even Agatha Christie when I was a young adult, but I was too busy exploring decidedly lower brow fiction.  It’s probably best not to admit to some of the books I read when I was just starting high school, but one I recall reading over a Christmas holiday and with great relish was a historical novel by Karleen Koen called Through a Glass Darkly.  I remember hiding out in my parent’s bedroom glued to my book while other festivities were going on.  Not a very refined choice of reading matter but it was a natural progression for me. 

Sakura: Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, beginning with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, are a favourite and influenced some of the choices I made and how I wanted to live.  I admired her strength and determination and her worship of scholarship and art.  She may not have been perfect and her memories may not have been altogether truthful but she dared to live life the way she wanted to and is the ultimate bohemian.

Danielle: After I graduated from college and had spent a little time traveling I remember reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  This was a pivotal book in my life and marked a turning point where I put behind me more childish things, and certainly childish attitudes.  Maybe because this story chronicles a road trip, it made me feel like the entire world was open to me and anything was possible.   

Sakura: One of my favourite books from the last five years is Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, the first in a ten volume fantasy series called The Malazan Book of the Fallen.  I’ve been a fan of fantasy and speculative fiction since I read the Narnia books as a child, but Erikson takes this genre to another level with his sophisticated plotting and prose.  It’s truly epic, adult and beautifully realised and, in my opinion, a great work of literature.

My reading habits have changed considerably since I started reading blogs and writing one of my own.  I think part of it has to do with how easy it is to buy cheap books especially when you’ve just read an interesting review (whether it’s glowing or snarky!) I find that I have a waiting list of books I need to read, making me wish sometimes that my choice of books could be more whimsical, as they once were.

Danielle: What a difficult question.  How can I choose only one when there have been so many wonderful discoveries in the last five years?  I’ll have to give the honor to Wilkie Collins, however, and one of my very favorite books by him, The Woman in White.  Gradually over time my reading choices have changed, and in some ways drastically so.  I didn’t study literature in college and my reading history has been shaky at best, so I often (even now on occasion) second guess my reading choices.  For many years I didn’t read any classic literature at all assuming I wasn’t a sophisticated enough reader to get what was going on or catch subtleties in the story.  About the time I started blogging in earnest I decided that I wanted to start reading more classics.  He’e been one of my favorite classic authors whose books I can read again and again. 

Blogging has definitely changed my reading habits.  I am a much more daring reader in some ways, but I am also a more discerning reader now.  And I have discovered so many authors and publishers who I think I would not have been exposed to had I not started blogging and interacting with other readers online.

Sakura: I’m a huge fan of historical mysteries since I first disovered Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael at school.  One of my favourites in the genre is the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters set in early 20th century Egypt.  They are funny, thrilling, full of colourful characters and you learn a lot about Egyptology!

Danielle: Although I am now much more willing to try difficult books, I think I am also a pretty predictable reader in many ways.  One of my favorite guilty pleasures is reading books by Georgette Heyer.  Her books are pure escapism.  I know what I can expect from her work, and sometimes that’s a good thing.

Kim: My father was a primary school teacher and an avid reader himself, and while my mother didn’t read novels, she had a large collection of books about art and nature, so I definitely grew up in a book-loving household. My sister and I were read to as young children and later, as teenagers, we went on weekly visits to the local library, accompanied by Dad. (Funnily enough, long after we left home, my dad went to the library after a long absence and the librarian handed him a new card and two additional ones “for your daughters” — seems we had been remembered even though we hadn’t been for at least five years!)

One of my fondest childhood memories associated with books was staying in a holiday house on the beach during the off-season (read wet, cold and windy) accompanied by the boxed set of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, which Dad had borrowed from the library at his school (which was also my school, but that’s another story). Throughout the week we took it in turns to read the books in order — Voyage of the Dawn Treader still remains my favourite.

But if I was to pick a favourite book from my childhood I would have to say Robert C. O’Brien’s The Silver Crown, which I must have read at least two dozen times.  It’s an adventure story meets psychological thriller; it was my first introduction to the concept of a page-turner. In it, a girl called Ellen receives a mysterious silver crown for her tenth birthday.  When she puts it on and goes for a walk, little does she know the lengths that (bad) people will go to in order to steal the crown from her.  For most of the story she is on the run from men wearing black cloaks and along the way she meets other characters whom she’s never sure whether to trust or not.  It’s essentially a story about good versus evil, and I just remember loving the feeling of fear and suspense it evoked in me as I read it. 

Jenny: I grew up in a house where reading was as natural and as expected and as full of pleasure as eating.  My parents read to me when I was an infant on up through my teen years — I can remember summer evenings when all five of us sat around listening to my father doing the Ent and Gollum voices in the Lord of the Rings books.  I must have been fourteen or fifteen then. I was a constant reader. All of us were.

When I was a child, I tended to read books over and over again.  I’d take big bags of books out of the library, bring them back the next week, and then check them out again immediately.  One favorite that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else mention was Sesyle Joslin’s The Night They Stole the Alphabet.  It’s about a little girl who wakes in the night to find that three shadowy robbers have stolen the alphabet from her bedroom wallpaper, and all her beloved books are missing their printing as well.  She takes off in pursuit, and her adventures lead her (with the help of some engaging friends) to a baby with a B in its bonnet, a reversed mermaid who warns her to mind her Ps and Qs, and a hospitable owl who invites her for a refreshing cup of T…
 

Kim: Probably the first truly “adult” novel that I read was Virginia Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic, which was about four siblings locked in an attic who were being slowly poisoned by their grandmother.  During their confinement, the two elder siblings — a brother and sister — fall in love.  It was quite a risqué book for a 14-year-old to read.  I probably would never have come across it on my own; my best friend, who had taken it from her mother’s shelf, had loaned it to me.  It didn’t take long for the book’s raunchy reputation to spread like wildfire through my school and the paperback did the rounds of all my friends.  It was quite battered and forlorn looking when it was finally returned to its proper home!  I don’t think my friend’s mother minded though, because we ended up reading the follow-up that was published the next year.  I occasionally see Flowers in the Attic in bookshops and have a little titter to myself.  I’m actually tempted to read it again, if only to confirm that it was probably the trashiest novel I’ve ever read!

Jenny: My mother majored in 19th-century British literature when she was in college, so she had a tendency to give me grown-up books before I was really ready for them.  But I can clearly remember a summer’s vacation to France when I was completely possessed by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  I must have been eleven years old, and I sat in a chair in our little attic apartment in Strasbourg, with our friends’ cat on my lap, and read that novel as if my life, and not the second Mrs. de Winter’s, depended on it.  I probably read it three times that summer.  What a punch that book still packs, doesn’t it?

Kim: I spent most of my early adulthood reading a lot of trashy thrillers, sappy romances and horror novels. By the time I was 20 I’d worked my way through Stephen King’s back catalogue and had just discovered Dean R. Koontz, Maeve Binchy and Leon Uris.  But then, for a reason I cannot remember, I picked up Patrick McCabe’s Booker shortlisted The Butcher Boy in a bookshop, bought it and took it home.  It was probably the first proper “literary” novel I’d ever read and I was knocked sideways by it.  For a start, the entire novel is written without punctuation, so you’re never sure where one sentence ends and another begins.  And the voice, that of a young troubled boy who commits a murder, is horribly disquieting.  Before long you realise he has become unhinged and is in desperate need of help — and love.  It’s a very dark and disturbing novel, but a compelling one.  It completely transformed the way I thought about fiction.  I was no longer satisfied reading middle-of-the-road “supermarket” novels; I wanted something meaty and confronting and challenging; I wanted books that explored moral dilemmas and showed the darker side of human nature.  As a result, I started reading a lot of dark literary stuff, including Ian Banks’ The Wasp Factory and the early works of John Banville (The Book of Evidence, Mefisto and The Revolutions Trilogy), to name but a few.  To this day, more than 20 years later, I still seek out that kind of dark fiction — and I look for that kind of subject matter in the non-fiction I read, too.

Jenny: I’m not certain whether this is cheating, because these are books I have read many times, but the Eliots of Damerosehay trilogy by Elizabeth Goudge (The Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim’s Inn, and The Heart of the Family) were very important to me during early adulthood struggles in particular.  In this trilogy, Goudge follows the Eliot family between the first World War and the second, and deals with the notions of what home means, what truth and integrity are when they are not centered only around the self, and how your own pain can be made into joyful sacrifice so something greater can be built.  She does all this with lightness and humor, and she has the tremendous gift of writing good people who are not boring.

Kim: I read up to 100 books a year, so a book has to be exceptional to stand out from the crowd. But one of the most affecting novels I’ve read in the past five years, and the one that I still think about years after having read it, is John McGahern’s The Barracks. This semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1963, is about a young woman (based on McGahern’s mother) who marries a widower, who already has a large family. Just as she’s getting used to her new routine and becoming a stepmother for the first time, she discovers a lump in her breast — and decides not to tell a soul about it. It’s an incredibly moving and haunting story — and it’s by far the best depiction of a woman’s voice, as written by a man, that I have ever come across. It made me rush out to my nearest Waterstones and buy McGahern’s entire back catalogue in one hit. I’m yet to be disappointed by anything he has written.

In terms of how blogging has changed my reading habits, I would say it has made me a “better” reader, by which I mean I think more deeply about what I’ve read and I tend to analyse a book’s structure, its plot, how the characters are developed, what the prose is like and so on. I’m constantly thinking why does this book work — or not work. And I’m more inclined to be forgiving of a book, knowing that getting all these elements “right” is so very difficult. I’ve never studied English literature or any arts subjects, so, in many ways, blogging about books has been a little like educating myself about the world of fiction — it’s been a constant learning exercise.

Reading so many other book blogs has also exposed me to a greater variety of literature and, while I’ve always been willing to read outside of my comfort zone, I’m now more inclined to try different types of books on the basis of blogger recommendations.

Jenny: Just one?!? Simon, that’s impossible. I’ve read so many magnificent books in the last five years — okay, um, just one then:  HomebyMarilynneRobinsonLittleBigbyJohnCrowley-andPaleFirebyVladimirNabokov. (!!) Blogging has changed my reading habits a lot. I used to go to the library, look around me at the sea of books I couldn’t remember, give up, and re-read an old favorite. Now that I have a real TBR list and a good way of remembering what I’ve read in the past, I read far, far more new things. I almost never re-read any longer. I get so many wonderful recommendations from other bloggers. And I never feel alone in what I’ve read or what I enjoy reading. 

Kim: I do like a good psychological thriller or suspense novel.  I don’t mind if the plot’s absurd or if it’s riddled with holes, as long as it’s a page-turner and keeps me guessing until the end I’m happy.  It’s only very recently that I have realised I’m trying to recapture what it was like to read The Silver Crown all those years ago!

I find these kinds of reads are perfect for when I’m on holiday and want to disengage the brain or when I need something to lift me out of a reading slump or just to cleanse the palate in between more “high-brow” reads. My favourite writer in this genre is Nicci French but I’ve also enjoyed novels by Helen Fitzgerald and James Siegel.  More recently I’ve discovered Patricia Highsmith and John Bowles.

Jenny: My reading habits are so eclectic that I doubt anything I said would surprise people (old issues of Popular Mechanics? Boxing Today? Waxing My Mustache: A Personal Memoir?  No, that last one would probably be interesting.) And I don’t feel guilty about anything I read. Oh, here’s a guilty pleasure: when I go to bookstores, I take the blaring political books with nasty titles (Liberals Are Ugly And Dress Funny; Republicans Hate Their Mothers) off the shelves, and shelve them in unexpected places where they are hard to find (travel, feminist theory.)  I ought not.  It’s making life difficult for the bookstore clerks. But I do it.

Hayley: Yes – dad had inherited a Victorian house with a library, lots of Wilkie Collins, illustrated bibles, bound copies of Punch, and mouldering boxes of book club choices in the attic. I wish I’d had more time to explore in there before the house went. My mother is, if anything, an even more compulsive buyer of books than I am (she turned her spare room into a library which works for her because she doesn’t like guests much) so there have always been a lot of books. I remember dad reading The Wind in the Willows to me but not much else sticks. It took me ages to learn to read and then it clicked pretty much overnight – that was the power of Enid Blyton. I loved the secret series and the famous five – especially the ones set on islands, and Five On A Treasure Island was an absolute favourite. I only remember sketchy details now but bits have stuck like glue. Blyton was a terrific writer for children, she made me feel like adventure was on the doorstep – and criminals excluded, it was. Nothing could distract me from those books and happily my parents were really good about always buying us loads of books.

Karyn: No, I wouldn’t describe it as a book-loving household.  Everyone read, and reading was certainly encouraged, but no one collected books, or thought to assemble a library, or spent any time discussing what they had read. It was romance novels and adventure stories, and reading for entertainment. 

I don’t remember being read to; my parents were both very young and they worked a lot of hours saving to buy a house. I can still remember how exciting it was to be given a book though, so perhaps it didn’t happen very often.  My earliest obsession was with The Famous Five, and I’m sure I loved every one even though I don’t remember anything about them now.  I’ll nominate Five get into a Fix, because I can still remember that cover. I came across the same edition recently in a secondhand book store in Chester and bought it for my  daughter.

Hayley: I pretty much went straight from The Famous Five to Dorothy L. Sayers when I was about 12 but much as I enjoyed herand others who weren’t children’s writers – I was still reading as a child. I think grown up reading probably started a year later with Gavin Maxwell’s Harpoon at a Venture. My sister and I had moved from one parent to another, from Scotland to England. It was a huge move and we got very homesick; a book about an abortive attempt to hunt basking sharks in the Hebrides really helped. Like most of Maxwell’s books it’s an object lesson in the best (or worst) laid plans going wrong but with wonderful writing and the sense that you could try anything however unlikely (never mind that it always seems to go wrong for him) it was inspiring.

Karyn: When I was 11 I was rewarded for winning some contest at school with the Penguin editions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and so they were the first grown-up books I read. I think I understood very little, although I can still remember everything about the moment at which I read of Helen’s death, of where I was and who I was with, and I think it was the most devastated I had felt by that age.

Hayley: It’s not exactly a favourite but Jancis Robinson’s Confessions of a Wine Lover changed my life. I was working in a bookshop and picked it up one lunch time, her passion for wine jumped off the page and sent me straight into the nearest wine shop. That led to a job and that’s been my life for the last 13 years. Wine is endlessly fascinating – and there are new things happening all the time, this book opened up a whole world of possibilities and excitement.

Karyn: The book that helped to establish the direction of my reading life was John Fowles’ The Collector. I read constantly but aimlessly before I found it, without much idea how to choose what to read. But in The Collector John Fowles alludes to The Tempest and discusses other books and authors, and so it gave me a blueprint to follow. I set about finding and reading every book it mentioned, and then every book they mentioned, and in the 1980s that meant searching through secondhand stores or ordering them from overseas. At some point I noticed that much of what I was reading had been published by Penguin so I just started buying any secondhand book I found with an orange spine, and I’ve never stopped.

Hayley: There are a lot of favourite books from the last five years and blogs have had a huge influence on my reading. About four years ago I lost two jobs over six months (most careless) after which came a spell of near unemployment. It gave me a lot of time to read and a lot more time to spend online. Blogging was a godsend; it felt like a positive thing to do and had the unexpected bonus of bringing me into contact with lots of new people. Following other blogs has bought my attention to books I might never otherwise have heard of – like Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves – and changed my reading habits entirely.  I think more about what I’m reading, and about what I’m going to read.  I make sure I finish books now which means I’m less likely to start something I don’t think I’ll enjoy, but the offer of review copies has lead me down paths I wouldn’t have expected.  The downside is that there are so many things I want to read that it’s hard to remember it’s not a race sometimes.  I used to re read favourite books all the time but rarely do it now, instead I get very excited about something, rave about it, and then all but forget it, however without doubt one of my favourite books of the last 5 years has been Lady Audley’s Secret.  It’s got a bit of everything – a cracking good story with a labyrinthine plot that never slows down and a touch of feminism in a villainess you can feel sympathy for. Proper can’t put it down stuff but thought provoking at the same time.  Perfect.

Karyn: Blogging hasn’t changed my reading habits as I have always collected the Penguins in order to read them, but I now discuss these books with an audience that is bigger than just my husband. I find I read fewer books now though, as it takes me a few days to reflect on what I have read in order to write up a post, whereas previously I would have just moved straight on to the next book.  The whole point of collecting and reading the old Penguins is to be exposed to books and authors I wouldn’t know of otherwise, and so I make discoveries all the time. My favourite so far has been The Last Tresilians by J.I.M. Stewart, an Oxford don better known as the mystery writer Michael Innes. It is the Penguin I would nominate as most deserving of a larger audience, and I loved everything about it.

Hayley: I save the really trashy stuff for television where I’ll watch any old rubbish as long as it’s super colourful and glossy looking but sometimes (and this may not be a surprise, and I don’t feel very guilty about it either…) that spills over into my reading.  I have a soft spot for Jilly Cooper circa Riders and Rivals. 1980s bonkbusters with horses and very little political correctness – Riders was my book of choice for long train journeys back up north and it was a blast (apart from the bit where a horse dies which inevitably caused tears somewhere near Oxenholme). It was totally absorbing with a great villain and didn’t demand much thought which was a great way to bookend a holiday. I tried to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on the same trip once but it didn’t take. 

Karyn: My reading is strictly Penguins or books on maths and statistics, so no guilty pleasures there.

Claire: My parents had both been avid readers but, with busy careers and two children to take care of, I don’t remember them reading a lot when I was little.  Still, their books were all over the house and I had unfettered access to them, something I took gleeful advantage of.  My grandparents were all devoted readers and they were the ones who really set the example for me.  My maternal grandmother volunteered in my school library and was my constant escort to the public library while my paternal grandparents, who I only saw once or twice a year since they lived so far away, used to take me to their library whenever I visited them.  My first press appearance was a photo in their local paper of me, as a toddler, listening attentively during story time at the library.

Even though my parents did very little reading on their own, reading before bed was an important family ritual.  My mother took charge of fairy tales, which she loved even more than I did, and my father covered everything else.  He introduced me to Tolkien, to Enid Blyton, and to Roald Dahl.  But before all that, he introduced me to A.A. Milne.  I had received The World of Christopher Robin (which unites When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six in a single volume) as a christening gift and for years it was the most important book in my life (I showed my sincere affection by scribbling in it with crayons).  My strongest memories of childhood bedtimes are of chanting “Disobedience” alongside my father and tearing up when he read “The Dormouse and the Doctor”.  That poor dormouse!

Colin: I remember a questionnaire in a school English class that asked how many books we had in our house, and the maximum answer was “Lots (20 or more)”. Even as a schoolchild I was astounded by the idea that 20 books was a lot – or even that any household could hold fewer than that – because our house had walls full of books. The ones in Dad’s study were somewhat beyond my ken (commentaries on Nahum were not my standard fare as a child; nor are they now) but there were plenty to suit my tastes, including bundles of Famous Five books and sundry other Enid Blytons. The first ‘proper’ book I read was a Famous Five (Five On a Secret Trail, I think) and – if you don’t count the Mr Men – that series was probably my favourite when I was about 7 or 8, although a couple of years later I would have chosen The Silver Sword or Cue for Treason. And yes, my parents did read to me – I particularly remember Mum reading me and my brother The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Colin:Between the ages of about 12 and 15 I read little other than Agatha Christie, having been introduced to her through Murder On The Orient Express. I don’t remember being so captivated by a book before, and even now I am reminded of it if I hear snatches of the Spice Girls’ debut album (which my brother was listening to on the other side of the bedroom wall while I was reading). I followed it up with Murder On The Links, and over the next few years read and re-read another 70 or so of her novels – I’ve always been very happy to re-read, even when I can remember exactly how the plot-line will pan out; and, to be honest, I often can’t remember.

Claire: I had nothing but contempt for romance novels growing up.  Without ever having read one, I condemned them all as poorly written and an awful waste of time.  It was the one area of the library I never ventured into.  Then, while visiting my grandmother one summer while I was in university, I picked up These Old Shades from her sizable Georgette Heyer collection.  I had spent so many years sneering at Heyer’s books without ever having taken the time to learn what they were about that I was shocked by how much I adored it.  The experience may not have precisely set me off in a new direction but it did make me much less snobbish about my book choices and far more likely to browse through libraries and bookstores without prejudice, changes which have certainly enriched my reading and my life by leading to some wonderful discoveries.

Colin: Early adulthood? I’m not sure when that is, but it must be around the time that I read Are You Dave Gorman?, a hilarious book about a chap called Dave Gorman trying to find other people called Dave Gorman. I hadn’t read a great deal of non-fiction up until that point, but this paved the way into other travel/humour type books, including Round Ireland With A Fridge, Yes Man, Googlewhack Adventure etc. Whilst the books cannot be described as great literature (or, indeed, literature) I have rarely read anything so amusing in fiction (Wodehouse is, of course, the most notable exception) and this not only opened up one genre to me, but persuaded me of the merits of non-fiction. Up to that point I had read one or two autobiographies – including Agatha Christie’s, which is excellent – but rather more since.

Claire: Blogging has made me a much more analytical reader, since as I’m reading now I’m always thinking of what I want to touch on in my review.  Whereas before I might only have considered the story and characters, I’m now much more sensitive to a writer’s style and to my personal preferences as a reader.  And of course my favourite bloggers have introduced me to so many wonderful books and publishers that I would otherwise never have discovered!  For instance, I had never heard of Angela Thirkell but I kept coming across the most intriguing mentions of her books on various blogs.  Finally, in early 2011, I picked up one of her early Barsetshire books for myself and was absolutely delighted by what I found.  I’ve loved all of her books that I’ve read, but my favourite has to be Summer Half, an energetic comedy that is the perfect blend of sharp wit and affection. 

Colin: The Wheel of Time is a superlative fantasy series written by the late Robert Jordan, with the final volume due this year (writing duties having been taken over by Brandon Sanderson) and whenever a new volume comes out I am very eager to read it. However, given that it is a series that I started about ten years ago, it’s probably cheating to include it in this question. Instead, I’d have to say that the most interesting books I’ve read have been the autobiographies of Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Michael Palin. It’s been a sadly long time since I’ve read a novel that I really loved: probably not since Northanger Abbey, which I read about three and a half years ago.

Blogging has not changed my reading habits at all! My own blog touches only lightly on books, and the only book-related blog I read is this one… despite your best efforts to persuade me of the wonders of Miss Hargreaves, The Diary of a Provincial Lady and Orlando, I have not especially enjoyed any of them and would be as wary of taking your literary advice as you would be about taking mine!

Rachel: I would say it was more ‘book appreciating’ than ‘book loving’. We didn’t really have any books in the house at all when I was growing up except for an ancient set of crumbling Dickens novels my mum inherited from her grandad and kept locked in a glass cupboard. Neither of my parents have ever been big readers, but my mum always appreciated the importance of reading and let me read whatever I wanted, and read to us every night. I got all my childhood books from the library, and my mum took me twice a week to change my books. I really loved going to the library – all those bookshelves full of choice! 

My favourite childhood book was The Secret Garden – my Nan bought it for me when I was about 7 and I have loved it ever since. Victorian and Edwardian children’s books can be quite earnest and sickly sweet but The Secret Garden isn’t either of those things. Mary Lennox is a wonderful heroine because she is a right little madam – she’s a spoilt brat who has a tantrum whenever things don’t go her way – but she’s also good hearted and wants to change, she just isn’t sure how. As an adult you can see that Mary’s behaviour stems from her parents’ indifference and neglect of her, and I like how Frances Hodgson Burnett explores the importance of having a nurturing home environment during a time when most parents of a certain class wouldn’t have seen much of their children at all. Mary’s gradual awakening and blossoming is wonderful to read, as is that of the sickly and querulous Colin Craven, who has also suffered from poor parenting. The Secret Garden itself is a beautiful metaphor of the transforming power of love, but I think this would probably go over children’s heads – for them, it’s a magical story about discovery and adventure and friendship. Plus, as a child who grew up in London, I LOVED the descriptions of the moors in Yorkshire – it was so different from the concrete jungle I was used to!

Teresa: I don’t remember anyone except me doing a lot of reading in my childhood home, although my mother did read romance novels now and then, and I have vivid memories of her reading Charlotte’s Web to me when I was around 5 years old. I always had lots of books, especially Little Golden Books and book and record sets. The latter were usually based on Disney movies or longer novels and popular children’s stories. I used to spend hours sitting on our family room floor following the words in the book as I listened to the records. I can still remember exactly what the narrator’s voice in the record for Black Beauty sounded like. That book and record was a special favorite, so I was excited when I was old enough to read the real book. But the book that I really want to talk about is the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read these over and over again and longed to live in pioneer days and cook a pig’s tail over a fire or take my lunch to school in a pail. (Now, you couldn’t pay me enough to live such a hard life.) I loved them all, but looking back, I realize that my favorite book at any given time was usually the one where I was closest to Laura’s age.

Qu.2) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed?  

Rachel: Probably Jane Eyre – I first read it when I was 12 – an awkward age for everyone!  I didn’t get all of it, but I was swept away by the romance and tragedy of it all. It made me feel very sophisticated – I’d never really read much about sex and relationships before – and it made me think about how complex adult life was and how love wasn’t as straightforward as I’d thought it would be. I was quite naive and sheltered and reading about a man who has a wife locked in an attic and then tries to marry someone else and then attempts to force that woman into an immoral relationship because his lust prevents him from living without her opened my eyes to what men could be capable of!

Teresa: I feel like I was slow to start reading “grown-up” books. I always happily stuck to my age range, and no one pushed me to challenge myself. On my own steam, I tried Jane Eyre when I was 12 and got hopelessly lost in the language and gave up. The first adult book that properly hooked me was Great Expectations. I read that when I was 14, my first year in high school, and I found it thrilling from beginning to end. For class, we actually read an abridged version in our textbook, and I loved it so much that I got the complete version and read it right after. Before this, I’d never been all that enthusiastic about English class. I did well in it, and I loved to read outside class, but I was mostly bored with the assignments in class.  This was the first time I could see the potential for literature as something to study and reading as something more than a way to pass the time. It wasn’t long after that that I decided I would study literature in college.

Qu.3) Pick a favourite book that you read in early adulthood – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.

Rachel: Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain had a very powerful effect on me when I read it as it made me realise how fragile life is, how fleeting youth is, and how much I took mine for granted.Vera Brittain had seen, experienced, done and survived so much by the time she was 21, and she made me feel rather pathetic in comparison. Her achievements and her bravery massively inspired me, and she remains an important role model of mine.  Her heroism especially humbled me –  her reaction to what she experienced made me determined to make something of my life, to use my passion and my voice to stand up for what I believe in, and to be deserving of the sacrifice her generation went through to ensure mine would have the freedom I have been enormously fortunate to have enjoyed. 

Teresa: This is a strange question to answer because even though I read lots in my early adulthood, not many of the books I read had much affect on me. I was very serious about my life as a Christian at the time, so the books that got to me would have dealt with some aspect of the spiritual. I remember a reread of Jane Eyre, which I had eventually conquered as a teenager, helping me see that a woman can be pious, independent, and happy. This was a huge revelation when I mostly got the message that devout Christian women would only be happy if tied to a properly Christian man. Probably the most important book, however, was Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Foster is a Quaker author, and this book is a practical guide to spiritual disciplines like meditation, study, confession, fasting, and so on. I read this in my early 20s, shortly after I started to care about my spiritual life, and it was so helpful. It’s not just a how-to book, which would have been a turn-off. He gets into the reasons for practicing these disciplines and gives good, sensible advice without ever seeming to push a specific regimen. It’s one I reread every few years.

Qu.4) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last five years, and how has blogging or the reading of blogs changed your reading habits?

Rachel: I discovered Persephone books through the blogging community, and from there an entire world of early to mid century women’s writing has opened up to me, which has revolutionalised my reading world. As someone who mainly read classics, I was delighted to find excellent, literary, beautiful writing that explored female experiences I could relate to, from a time period that had always fascinated me. My favourite discovery over the last five years has probably been Elizabeth Bowen, and I can’t really name a favourite of her novels, because they are all magnificent. Her subtle, intelligent, gorgeous writing mesmerises me, and I adore her depictions of 1930s England – she really captures that sense of uncertainty and pending change that rippled under everyday life in those immediate pre-war years.

Teresa: Where can I begin with how blogging has changed my reading? The biggest change is that it’s made me a more thoughtful reader. After I graduated college, but before I began blogging, I read a lot, but most of the books fell right out of my brain as soon as I read them. Once I was out of school, I didn’t have a place to discuss what I was reading and no real reason to think deeply about all those books. Blogging gives me that reason.

Blogging has also expanded my knowledge of the many worthwhile books out there. I’ve become much more aware of little-known classics and international authors. So in that spirit, I’ll mention a book I never would have known about were it not for blogging and that’s the fascinating Nox by Anne Carson. It’s both a memoir and translation of a poem by Catullus, all presented in an accordion-fold format in which Carson’s writings are interspersed with photos and bits of letters and other items that demonstrate how fragmentary our memories are. It’s a beautiful book, but not one that you’d be likely to find in many libraries or bookstores, and I never would have known about it had several blogging friends not enthusiastically written about it.

Qu.5) Finally – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!  

Rachel: My guilty pleasure is Rosamund Pilcher – as I said before, we didn’t really have any books in our house when I grew up, and all my books were from the library, so when I had finished all my library books, I had nothing left to read – a nightmare for an insomniac like me! One night in my mid teens I was stuck with nothing to read, so my mum gave me Coming Home, a battered paperback she had in her bedroom drawer. I was hooked from page one, and so my mum tracked down her other books, read them, and passed them on to me afterwards, and we had great fun talking about them and then watching the TV serials they did of most of Rosamund Pilcher’s books in the 90s and early 2000s. I can’t quite put my finger on why I enjoy them so much – I think they’re just great escapism, but well written, well characterised, and well plotted escapism, with interesting settings and historical details. Whenever I am ill and can’t concentrate much, I love wallowing in a good old Rosamund saga!

Teresa:  It’s been a long time since I’ve read any of these books, so a lot of people probably aren’t aware of my fascination with true stories about people who survive (or don’t survive) extreme physical dangers. These days, I mostly get these stories through movies (128 Hours is my most recent favorite), but I went through a phase where I was reading one disaster narrative after another. Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Miracle in the Andes were particularly gripping, but I also remember enjoying historical works like The Children’s Blizzard, The Worst Hard Time, and The Johnstown Flood. There’s something cathartic about reading these books and imagining what it would be like to face such a challenge, but I always feel a little guilty about it, like I’m getting my entertainment from someone else’s tragedy. (And now I’m craving a disaster book.)