Stuck in a Book

Karen blogs at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, and it was as ‘Kaggsy’ that I first met her (I believe) in a LibraryThing group which celebrates Virago Modern Classics.

Erica: I did grow up in a book-loving household, and I think my parents must have read to me, but I don’t remember it! I think I must have learned to read at quite a young age; I can remember early on at primary school there being a book sale and being very excited about it. I chose a bumper Mr Man book that I think I still have somewhere with my name in the front and various scrawls.

I remember being a wide-ranging and omnivorous reader, and taking pride and comfort in my own bookcase filled with books in my bedroom, and finding various small spaces to become book-reading dens. I remember that I read Alice Adventures in Wonderland at the age of seven and became deeply attached to it despite not understanding most of it! What were these ‘conversations’ that Alice couldn’t find in her sister’s book? Not a clue. But, importantly, this didn’t seem to matter at all. So much of the pleasure of Alice is in the sounds of the words, and I think those that I didn’t understand were still enjoyable (and many of them are, of course, made up by Carroll). I find the conventional wisdom that children’s books must not contain vocabulary considered to be beyond the level of the readership rather frustrating. How else do you learn new words?

Through the Looking-Glass always had a different feeling to me than Alice; somehow it was more resonant, and more disturbing. I imagined myself going through the mist of the looking-glass into that world which seemed rather nightmarish to me.

Karen: Yes I did – both parents were always readers: my dad liked factual books (Chariots of the Gods and the like when I was growing up) plus thrillers and sci fi, whereas my mum reads more traditional ‘women’s books’ (Santa Montefiore being her current favourite). They always read to me from an early age – in fact, my parents tell me that they thought I had learned to read particularly early as a young child, until they realised that I had simply memorised the stories and was reciting them back to people and pretending to read!

It’s hard to pick out just one book that I loved from my childhood as I tended to read in series – Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, ‘Mystery‘ and Five Find-Outers were particular favourites, and once I started to get pocket money, it would go on a new Enid every week. I was also keen on the Narnia books though I came to them a little later. Trying to pick out one, I keep oddly enough coming back to a book I kept getting out of our local library (and I can still visualise the inside of the building where I would get it checked out) – Dr. Seuss’s I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. It was the strange, surreal, alien imagery that appealed to me, so unlike my real life – I guess books have always been something of an escape for me!

Erica: I continued to read books I didn’t understand – I remember my Mum not having any children’s books in the house when I was visiting one weekend (complicated family) and giving me Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. At the age of 10 or so I really couldn’t see what was funny about it! (But I soldiered on, as you do, and read all the works of Austen without understanding much by the age of 14.)

One of the first adult books I really enjoyed was Wuthering Heights, an A level set text. But unfortunately, and surprisingly given my current profession, I hated being made to analyse it – or ‘pick it apart’ as I considered it then. I wanted to be transported, to enjoy that narrative hypnosis which I thought was the point of novels. In retrospect this may be related to the fact my life was difficult at this point – more family breakdown – but I also suspect that 16 year old girls are suckers for a doomed love story and do not wish to made to relinquish that surrendered reading!

I did not do an English degree because I thought it would ruin reading for me!

Karen: Again, this is really hard to pick out just one, but I guess I would plump for The Hobbit. Some relatives heard that I loved the Narnia books (I would probably have been about 11 or so) and sent a copy of The Hobbit which both me and my dad devoured, and then followed up by raiding the library for the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy and reading the lot. After that I really never looked back – I borrowed my mum’s romances (Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart etc al) and the Agatha Christies that were lying around the house, plus other crime authors like Ed McBain, and then followed this up by discovering Solzhenitsyn and the Russians when we studied the Russian Revolution at school. I was a fairly troubled teenager, as my favourite grandmother died when I was 11 and it took me a long time to deal with it – like I said, books were an escape, my coping mechanism.

Erica: Of all the books I read in my 20s, there is a clear winner for the one that changed my life. My post-degree working life was all about books, at different stages in their production. First I worked at Waterstone’s, then in marketing at a publisher, then in editorial. My work was pretty routine and unchallenging, and I was wondering what to do next when I saw an advert for a part-time MA called ‘Women, Gender and Writing’ at Roehampton University. I absolutely loved my MA. It was truly like a door opening. It showed me a way of thinking about books that stimulated and inspired me, and I felt that I had finally found my bookish world. After those years of resisting analysis I now loved thinking in a critical, informed way.

The book that changed my life was A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (1951). We had a seminar with the brilliant Nicola Humble who explained that this novel, and others like it were regarded as ‘middlebrow’ and as light, comforting reads for women, bless their feather-brained heads.

I couldn’t believe it. The novel I had read was funny, yes, but also incisive, acute and downright cruel in its dissection of the disappointments of life. A Game of Hide and Seek tells the story of Harriet and Vesey. As the novel begins they are eighteen and in love. At the end of the summer they will part, Harriet will marry someone else, and they will not enter each other’s lives again for another twenty years. Harriet and Vesey never protest and declare their love, yet it is omnipresent, and entirely credible. I thought it was one of the best novels I had ever read, and so well-written it almost hurt.

It formed part of my MA dissertation, which I called ‘The Reassurance of Cruelty’ – for the only reassurance I could see in it was that Taylor was saying yes, domestic life is as difficult and cruel as you thought. A reality is reflected back: yes, life is like that. A Game of Hide and Seek, my sense of outrage that it wasn’t recognised for the exceptional novel I considered it, and trying to understand why that was, started me on the road to an academic career.

Karen: Well, my early 20s were a pivotal time with my reading – this was when I discovered so many of the writers whose work I still love and return to. So that makes it really difficult to pick a favourite. But I think I will go for a slightly unlikely book, Literary Women by Ellen Moers. It was published by The Women’s Press and I was a recent convert to feminism at the time, having recently discovered Virago too. Literary Women was a revelation, opening my eyes to an amazing amount of women writers I’d never heard of, let alone read. I finished up with a huge list of authors I wanted to discover which led me onto another pivotal book, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I’d never read anything like it and it set me off on a whole new lifetime of reading, mainly because I was no longer intimidated by literature, and felt I could read anything I wanted to, from de Beavoir, Sartre, Camus et al to Italo Calvino (whose “If on a winter’s night a traveler” almost got picked here as it caused me a major obsession with the author which still continues to this day!)

Erica: I started blogging as part of my work on the collection of popular fiction published between 1900 and 1950 at Sheffield Hallam University. I don’t think I would have started a personal blog, but I’ve found I love being part of the conversation about books that happens in blogs.

Blogging has definitely changed my reading habits, because the reviews are of books in the collection. I very rarely find time to read books that fall outside this 1900-1950 time period. Now, hang on… this is just the same as when I was writing my PhD! I better face it. Contemporary fiction is a bit of a closed book to me. (Actually I did just read Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2013), borrowed from my Mum. It was HORRIBLE. I am mentally scarred. There was a clue in that it is publisher by Hammer, of Hammer horror fame, but I didn’t clock that….)

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman (2011). I read it on a long train journey and I snorted and wept with laughter for several happy hours. So much of what she said resonated with me, and she said it all so well. A good rant is an underappreciated genre! And it is part of the splendid resurgence of feminism in recent years.

Karen: I’ve been blogging for a year now, and really enjoyed it – and probably discovered a lot books because of it! I enjoyed so much reading other blogs and the pleasure it gave me that I wanted to get involved and give something back. I really enjoy interacting with other bloggers and being part of a community, particularly as I don’t actually know many people in real life that read the same sort of thing as I do! Blogging *has* changed my reading habits, for the better I think – I read more thoroughly and analytically now, and think much more about what I’ve read because I have to try and communicate what I feel about the book to any readers!

A favourite book? Again, it seems cruel to only pick one – but Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita stands out as having totally engrossed me and changed the way I look at things a lot – I see the absurd everywhere nowadays! But I think honourable mentions should go to the wonderful Persephone Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day which I couldn’t put down and had me grinning from ear to ear; and Miss Hargreaves, which I heard about from your blog and really must read again!

Erica: My not-guilty-at-all pleasure is to read Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics. For my birthday and at Christmas my Dad is instructed to buy me the latest volume – for my birthday just gone it was Series 9, volume 2 – thank you Dad! I love the humour, insight and feminist sensibility of Buffy, and the visual experience of reading a comic, probably because it is so different from what I usually read. I also think it is important to have some reading for which you will NEVER take notes. I guess it is back to the ‘surrendered reading’ of my childhood.

Karen: Cookbooks! I have a weakness for reading them and have three shelves in my kitchen…. It probably stems from when I went vegetarian when I was 18 and had to read up on it a bit – this was a *loooong* time ago without all the veggie conveniences we have now. Some of my oldest are from the 1970s and though I probably wouldn’t cook much from the older books, they read almost like a kind of social history – it’s amazing how our culinary habits have changed!!

Karen, on Erica’s choices: Well, the first thing that springs to mind here is that this person obviously likes reading about feisty heroines – starting with Alice and ending with Buffy, both of whom are strong and individual, though in different ways. Alice is contrary from the point she runs off after the White Rabbit to her defiance of the Court and is definitely a good role model for young people! And Buffy is a character who takes no nonsense either.

This reader also seems to have a taste for the dramatic and passionate, as Wuthering Heights is certainly that, and also features another feisty woman in the form of Cathy, refusing to let death get in the way of her love. Although A Game of Hide and Seek might seem like a quieter proposition, it also features a heroine who marries for money, not love, but never stops caring for the man in her heart, so both of these books show a reader who likes to examine the motivations of people’s passions.

As for Caitlin Moran – well, there’s another feisty one! She’s pithy and funny and so although this reader isn’t necessarily female (plenty of men I know like spiky, in control females!), he/she certainly has a fondness for dominant women – I could foresee interesting time spent in their company discussing books!

Liz blogs in two places!  Her book blog can be found at Libro Full Time, while her work blog is at Libro Editing.

 Alex: My parents both read but I remember being rather embarrassed by their book choices – mostly Dick Francis and Danielle Steele. I was a voracious reader and wanted to know about everything from medieval churches to dinosaurs to how computers work so my mother signed me up to the library very early on, something I am very, very grateful for. Having access to the library gave me the freedom to explore without worrying about how much all these books actually cost or how long my enthusiasm for steam trains would last. It’s down to those six orange cardboard tickets (and some wonderful librarians) that I am the reader I am today!

My happiest memory of that first library is spending hours sitting cross-legged in the corner of the children’s section reading all of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. Each volume is a different colour – Green, Blue, Crimson etc – and the editions I read were illustrated. I didn’t know they were classics but nearly all the stories were brand new to me and I was spell-bound.

Liz: I did grow up in a book-loving household, with books all over the place, books the main thing I bought with my own money, and books bought for me. I was read to, and I remember the excitement of going through Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea with my Dad. As for a favourite childhood book, this is a bit difficult, because I’m a great one for re-reading childhood favourites, so it’s hard to differentiate between my favourite books then and now. I loved the E. Nesbit books, and the Noel Streatfeilds, and had a huge passion for pony books. I would guess that maybe The Secret Garden is the book I remember loving as a child and still loving now.

Alex: I, Claudius by Robert Graves when I was about 12 or 13. I was far too young to be reading it but I was going through a phase of being fascinated by the Romans. My parents had split up earlier that year and I was looking for escapism. It’s such an outrageous book in so many ways, scandal on every page, very confessional in style and not at all what I thought it would be when I picked it up. It was the perfect book for taking to the park that summer and getting lost in.

Liz: I read The Hobbit aged 7, because I was a precocious and advanced reader, but I recall not really getting much out of it. May I skip forward to the age of 14, when I was introduced to a whole slew of new authors by a dear neighbour, who was an outpost of socialist feminism in a sea of Tory reactionary village life? She got me into Virago books, Barbara Pym, Barbara Comyns, and especially Iris Murdoch. Although I was working my way around the adult section of our TINY village library by then, doing Agatha Christie and Patrick Moore’s sci fi and the James Bond and Georgette Heyer books from my school library, when I read Murdoch’s A Severed Head in my mid-teens, I remember feeling VERY grown-up and sophisticated, even though, as a rather sheltered only child attending a girls’ Grammar School, I have no idea what I would have actually made of it and whether I’d have understood much of it!

Alex: It has to be Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I had a modern English version that I’d enjoyed reading in my teens but I fell in love when I read it in the original Middle English in my early twenties.

The tales crackle with sarcasm and subversion to the point where Terry Jones has even made a case in Who Murdered Chaucer? for the poet’s mysterious disappearance in 1400 (no grave, no official mention of his death, no family story about it) being down to his dangerous use of commoners’ English instead of courtly French and critical portrayal of religious characters like the nun and the pardoner. The tales are vibrant, earthy and foreign and they’re great fun to read aloud. They also switched my interests from formal monarchy-led history to social history. I now have a bookcase entirely filled with non-fiction history books but very few of them are about kings or queens and that’s largely down to Chaucer!

Liz: I discovered a good set of writers in my 20s and 30s – Larry McMurtry, Anne Tyler, Jill McCorkle, Douglas Coupland, and got into a great habit of picking up every new book they wrote, which has seen me through.  I especially like Anne Tyler’s A Slipping-Down Life. I suspect that reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth when it came out in the single-volume paperback, which must have been in about 1997 when I was 25, sealed my love of books set on the Indian sub-continent.

Alex: I came to book blogging nine years ago because my personal blog was being overtaken by bookish thoughts. Book blogging in 2004 was an odd thing to be doing and the few of us that were doing it were truly isolated. Watching a book blogging ‘community’ form and then fragment over the years has been fascinating and being part of it has definitely affected my reading. Without book blogging I suspect I’d have lost my childhood enthusiasm for diverse reading and the happy confidence to try just about anything. Without my favourite bloggers’ recommendations I would have missed so many quirky, niche or older books and my reading life would have been much poorer for it.

2012 was a great reading year for me but The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov was my favourite book by far. I’d read it in my teens but got much more out of the re-read. It breaks so many literary rules – the main characters don’t show up till halfway through the book, the heroes aren’t actually good people, it’s crazy and cruel… yet it is funny and provocative and just about perfect.

Liz: A favourite author I have discovered in the last few years is Dorothy Whipple, via, of course, the Persephone books imprint. I can’t pick a favourite, but knowing I have Persephone in general and Whipple in particular in my life gives me great joy and comfort.

How did I come to blogging? Well, I’ve been keeping a reading journal in notebooks since 1997, and in August 2005, I decided to put my book reviews onto my new LiveJournal blog – I didn’t really want to blog just about my personal life, and I liked sharing my book reviews. I started my second WordPress blog in November 2011 in order to record my transfer from employment to full-time self-employment, and my book reviews snuck onto there as I transformed it into a blog about my life as a self-employed person, including having time to read (at last, after a couple of sticky years where my reading totals went WAY down). Reading is one of my comforts and keeps me sane, and it was important to me to build that up again, and I started putting my book reviews on this blog, finally bringing my LJ archive through earlier this year.

Blogging hasn’t changed my reading habits, but book review blogging has changed my book review blogging habits (still with me?) as I discovered a few months ago that I was dissatisfied with my short reviews, and decided to review two books at a time in a longer review format, rather than three or four snapshots. I’ve really enjoyed doing this, and my readers have appreciated the new format, too. Amusingly, I thought that blogging about and posting a picture of my current State of the TBR every month, and confessing when I bought new books, would rein my book buying habits in a bit. Nope!

Alex: I don’t really have guilty pleasures! I’m going to pick No Logo by Naomi Klein. Published in 1999 it details how much power the major brands have – in sweat shops and McJobs, in media and lobbying various governments. It quickly became the bible of the culture jamming and anti-globalisation movements and remains one of my favourite social history/political books. I think it’s also one of the first non-IT books I read that cited websites. I don’t often write about my politics so perhaps the fact that I strongly believe in actively avoiding multinational companies and supporting local ones instead, am about to give up my TV for good and have NEVER eaten anything from a McDonalds will surprise people.

Liz: I surprised someone just the other day by having a Jilly Cooper book or two on the bookshelf. Not a guilty pleasure – I like a well-written (and that’s the key – Cooper has awful puns but writes well, Binchy and Keyes catch the nuances of Irish English beautifully) lighter novel, so Cooper, Maeve Binchy (A Scarlet Feather) and Marian Keyes have a happy place on my bookshelves among the Murdochs and Viragoes. I do like a cosy mystery, too, preferably set in the world of quilting or knitting. I don’t count these as a guilty pleasure, either, as they still rank higher than a trashy mag or rubbishy TV programme in my estimation! Another massive passion which many people don’t know about is for mountaineering, sailing and Polar exploration books – such as Tim Moore’s Frost on my Moustache – I am not known for my physical prowess or for venturing far from home, but these are a love that has sustained me from late childhood onwards.

Liz on Alex’s choices: A fairly serious person with an interest in myth and legend, who possibly had a humanities-based education and has been influenced politically by their reading. They like to keep up to date with current themes in sociology and politics and read books for their basic interest rather than trendiness. They’re well-read, fairly serious, and have fairly intellectual pursuits.

Christine blogs at The Book Trunk, a site (and I quote) ‘dedicated to my grandmother, who ran away from her Norwegian home in 1915 and arrived in England with nothing but a trunk full of books.’

Simon: As you will already have gathered in a previous series from Colin’s answer, our house was indeed rather filled with books – and this in an area where owning books at all was rather unusual – but Mum and Dad always encouraged us to go to the library, rather than buying books. That’s a life lesson which has, obviously, been taken to heart… ahem!

I imagine both my parents read to us, but I particularly remember Mum doing so – and having to stop reading The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis because we found it too distressing, although we loved hearing the rest of the Narnia books. Actually, that reminds me of a time Dad did read to us – when he read Mr. Mischief by Roger Hargreaves to us at his sister’s house, and we both cried at his misdeeds. Something about destroying a cake, perhaps. (I’m sure Dad also read to us without us crying!)

But, after that build-up, I couldn’t really pick any author other than Enid Blyton for this first answer. The first book I read by myself (for which read: I read one page, Mum read three) was a Famous Five book, and I got hooked on Enid Blyton for the next five or six years, reading very little else. Amongst my favourites, and starting a passion for twin-books which persists today, was the St. Clare’s series, starting (I believe) with Twins at St. Clare’s. I don’t know how well it would stand up to an adult’s eyes, and it’s probably full of hideous morals about stiff upper lips, but I relished it (and never got on with Malory Towers, incidentally.)

Christine: I was incredibly lucky growing up in a bookish household and books have been a huge part of my life from the time I was really small – when I was a baby and wouldn’t sleep my mother held me and read aloud from whatever she was reading at the time! My parents were both great readers so the house was always full of books, and they would talk about what they had read. They encouraged my brother and I to do the same, and they never stopped us reading anything, however unsuitable it may have seemed. When we were very young they read us stories (not just at bedtime, but at other times of the day as well), and told tales ‘out of their heads’, which we loved. We read everywhere, even at mealtimes – I was amazed to discover other families viewed this as bad manners! And we took books on holiday, and acquired more while we were away, instead of souvenirs (a habit I’ve never lost).

I’ve got so many childhood favourites. There was Adventures of Mr Pip about a strange goblinish little man, who loved the colour red, and was always getting into trouble, and The Secret Garden and the Just So Stories, as well as lots of Noel Streatfeild and Edith Nesbit, and Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, and Milly Molly Mandy and too many others to mention.

However, standing out above everything else is my copy of AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young, bought when I was less than a year old, with an inscription at the front written by my father. It’s this book, more than any other, which made me aware of the magic of words and the way they are used, and the rhythms of speech, and how you can read something and imagine what happens next. Reciting the rhymes became a family ritual (repeated, years later, with my own daughters). For rice pudding days there was, of course, ‘Rice Pudding’. On trips to London we chanted ‘Buckingham Palace’, and ‘Lines and Squares’. Illness required ‘The Dormouse and the Doctor’, while the opening of a new jar of marmalade called for ‘The King’s Breakfast’.  My daughters always loved this book as well, and I still adore it as much as ever I did – more so, perhaps, because it conjures up such happy memories.

Simon: I’m lucky that there has never been a stage in my life when I didn’t love reading, once I’d started, but I clung on to pretty poor teen and pre-teen books for rather too long. It was wise of my parents to let me read what I wanted, so that reading didn’t become a chore. But the move from Sweet Valley High (TWINS!) was bound to come and, although I can’t remember what drew me to it, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was probably the first Grown-Up book I read – except for that gateway drug Agatha Christie.

Nervously, I re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four a couple of years ago, to see if it was still as brilliant as I thought it was when I was about 14. And, oh, it is. Yes, there is the political satire (or warning), and its dystopian overtones are probably what has secured its literary significance, but for me it is chiefly fascinating for character. Winston Smith is the true everyman, with the hopes and weaknesses and unexpected courage that so many people possess. In impossible circumstances, he is neither an unrealistic hero nor a passive victim, but somehow both. I don’t know how much of Orwell’s talent I understood at 14, but it took me away from the enjoyable rubbish that (in turn) had put me on the path of loving reading.

Christine: I can remember reading Oliver Twist, and crying for days when Nancy was murdered. And Jane Eyre is my ‘must have’ book’ but I have no idea when I first read it. So I’ve plumped for Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, which I read when I was at grammar school. It was most definitely not on the curriculum there – I bought it at the local bookshop, attracted by the title and the cover on the 1966 Penguin edition, which shows a photograph of a man wearing a smiling devil’s mask, complete with horns, as he peers over the shoulder of a marble angel. It was one of the first contemporary novels I encountered (until then most of my reading was classics based). Written by a modern woman, it opened up a whole new world in my reading life. I loved the spare quality of the writing, the wry humour, the subversive feel of the book, and the fact that there were no heroes and heroines in the conventional sense, just ordinary men and women going about their everyday lives, completely unprepared for the advent of Dougal Douglas and the chaos and confusion he trails behind him.

And Spark blends reality and fantasy so skilfully that you never know what is real and what is not, or whether the whole thing is an illusion. Before that I’d never considered the nature of truth and fiction. I’d read books set in magical worlds, and others that were firmly rooted in the real world, but this novel broke down barriers and genres and mixed things up in a totally unexpected way, and made me think about how it was written, as well as the story.

School was very conventional, very middle-class, with great emphasis on working towards exams and taking part in sports, and I felt very much a ‘number’, rather than an individual. Finding this book helped me realise that I was still a person in my own right, and could make my own choices about things I liked, and it didn’t matter if other people didn’t approve or didn’t enjoy the same things.

Simon: How tempting it was to write about Miss Hargreaves here! But I knew that would give me away in an instant, and instead I focused on the part about ‘setting me off in a certain direction’. Since I have yet to set off in any permanent direction, I will have to consider one of the books which led to me choosing to study English Literature at university. Truth be told, I never considered anything else for long (except for a brief dalliance with English and History) and I can’t imagine studying anything else – but reading Virginia Woolf still changed things for me. It was after having seen the film The Hours that I wanted to see what it was based on, and the woman whose children I babysat lent me Mrs. Dalloway when I was 17. How strange to think it was only three years since I’d started thinking about adult fiction at all!

Looking back, I’m surprised that a 17 year old engaged with Virginia Woolf’s writing, but I must have been either precocious or ahead of my time, because I absolutely loved it. By this age there were plenty of novelists I’d grown to love, but I didn’t realise any author could use language so perfectly, or craft such beautiful, thoughtful novels. And analysable ones, too! I realised that Proper Literature could be as fun and lovely to read as anything else, and that I would love to write essays about this sort of thing. I’d found my period, definitely, and ten years later I’m still at university, still writing about Virginia Woolf (admittedly she only gets a paragraph or two in my thesis – but she’s still there!)

Christine: I did a lot of re-reading, rather than trying anything new. I think I was seeking comfort and reassurance. I’d moved to the Midlands and was desperately home-sick, not just for my family, but for the sound of a southern accent and the sight of a London bus! One of my few discoveries was Margaret Atwood: I was knocked out by Lady Oracle, The Edible Woman and Cat’s Eye. Again, it’s that blend of fantasy and reality which I find so appealing, and the fact that these women are all searching for an identity and a way to express themselves.

But, since I stuck to old favourites then, my choice has to be Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, which I return to time and time again. It’s seen me through good times and bad, and whenever I read it I am just as enthralled. I love everything about it, especially the way Jane is so quiet and unassuming, but knows her own mind, and has the courage to stand by her convictions, whatever the cost to her own happiness or that of others.

And I am such a sucker for a happy ending! Forget the rest of the final chapter, just read the opening sentence: “Reader, I married him.” That’s all I ever want to know. It’s such a satisfactory conclusion, although I have to admit my view of Mr Rochester has changed over the years, and I no longer see him as an alluring romantic hero. He’s not very nice at all (and that’s putting it politely). He married his first wife for her fortune, hid her in the attic when she became ill, ran away to Europe, kept mistresses, then tried to marry Jane, who had no friends or family to protect her. And what about that chapter where he dresses as a gipsy woman and tells fortunes for his guests? There’s an element of real cruelty there I think as he toys with them all, like a cat playing with a mouse.

But I don’t care! I love him, and I love Jane, and I want them to live happily ever after.

Simon: Usually I’m asking people from other blogs to share their blog story; perhaps, since you’re already reading Stuck-in-a-Book, you know the story. But I’ll recap – I started blogging in 2007 as a distraction to my final undergraduate exams, since I already knew various people who’d taken up blogging from an online book discussion list I was on.

Although I’ve been a bit intractable with my reading, more often buying the books that other bloggers recommend than actually reading them, there has (of course) still been quite a number of fantastic books I’ve read as the direct or indirect result of blogging. But the author I’m going to pick is one I’d read before started blogging, but to whom I have the blogosphere to thank for re-introducing me. And it’s Muriel Spark. I’d read, and been pretty indifferent to, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means, but enthusiastic reviews from Simon, Polly, and Claire (I think) led me to pick up another Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat – and I was hooked.

I’ve since read another eight or nine, and even co-run a delightfully successful Muriel Spark Reading Week across the blogosphere. The one I’ll pick here, which was the fourth one I read overall, is Loitering With Intent, a madcap tale of a memoir club, corrupt publishers, and fanciful heroine cheerfully confusing everyone. It’s quintessential Spark, and the blogosphere is to thank for making Muriel one of my favourite authors.

Christine: Ask me the same question on a different day and I’ll probably give you a different answer. Today I’ll say Miss Hargreaves, by Frank Baker – one of Simon’s recommendations. And no, I’m not currying favour, but this was so wacky, and so funny, and slightly disturbing at the same time, and I really, really enjoyed reading it.

I wouldn’t have picked it up before I started blogging, but I’ve been a little more adventurous recently. I’ve read and fallen in love with Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and other authors from the first half of the 20th Century, and I’ve ventured into the realms of non-fiction with Kathleen Jamie and Robert MacFarlane. Additionally, I set myself an annual challenge – 2012 was the Year of the Essay, this year I’m exploring short stories, and next year I want to discover some foreign authors. But I still love my 19th Century classics, and I still hate gory crime thrillers and dystopian futuristic novels!

My younger daughter persuaded me to write a blog because I was so downcast after being made redundant. To start with I wrote about anything that caught my interest. Gradually books took over, and I started following other people because I like to see their views on what they’ve read, but I don’t post as regularly as I should.

Simon: My tastes tend to stick with fiction, or non-fiction about fiction (author biographies etc.), but I do have a rather unexpected love for books about psychology and neurology. Perhaps it is truer to say that I love books by Oliver Sacks. I know very little about science, and other authors I’ve tried on these topics haven’t captivated me at all, but Sacks’s A Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Hallucinations are primarily exercises in storytelling. The human mind is, of course, limitlessly fascinating – and I am usually fascinated by it when it is shown through fiction, and the way characters behave – but Sacks makes the most inaccessible of topics utterly accessible for the layman, and writes so compassionately and engagingly that anybody would be swept away.

Christine: Difficult! My reading matter is very predictable, and I don’t think one should ever feel guilty about books. However, I do sometimes feel slightly uneasy when I’m caught reading children’s literature! Judging by people’s reaction this is not considered normal behaviour for a supposedly sensible adult. All I can say is, it should be. Perhaps it counts as a guilty pleasure? What do other people think? Anyway, I have a real weakness for children’s books, even picture books, like Winnie the Witch. I still read them, I still buy them, and a friend’s young children keep me up to date with modern authors and swap favourites with me. For a really joyous, life affirming story I’d opt for The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which will get you some very odd looks indeed if you read it on a train, as I once did. So perhaps it is a passion best indulged in private!

Christine, on Simon’s choices: Oh dear, this is the bit I’m no good at! Those are interesting choices – curious that we both selected Muriel Spark, and I very nearly plumped for Mrs Dalloway instead of Miss Hargreaves, so it would seem to be someone with similar tastes, who likes understated writing and authors with a darkly comic edge. Then there’s Nineteen Eight-Four, which is much too bleak for me, but Orwell is another author who produces pared back prose with never a word out of place. So this is someone who is attracted by well written prose, rather than a rattling good story, and the inclusion of the Oliver Sacks’ book would seem to indicate someone with an interest in psychology perhaps… I think it’s someone who’s much better grounded in reality than I am and, perhaps, someone who has studied English. Now let’s see how wrong I am!

Mystica blogs at Musings From Sri Lanka, where she writes not only about books, but also about quilts, crafting, and Sri Lanka.

Alison: Yes, there were always lots of books at home. My father was a Methodist minister and naturally worked from home. In each house we lived in he had a study lined with books. Aside from Dad’s theological books – both he and mum read for pleasure too. My Mum is still a keen reader and often tells me about what she is reading when I phone her. My sister and I were read to – although I don’t have any distinct memories of being read to – I just know that we were. I was a keen reader from early on, despite not being a gifted or stand out pupil in any way at school – my mum thinks I read from about three years old. The childhood books I remember the best are books I read to myself rather than ones that were read to me. One book that stands out for me is Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden. I loved it – and later watched the TV serial enthralled. I think Carrie’s War was partly responsible for a feeling of over whelming nostalgia for stories – be they in books or on TV – set in WW2.  I think I was both horrified and fascinated as a child by the idea of war and the evacuation of children. 

Mystica: Not a book reading household at all. I was an only child for 16 years and books were my only salvation! Mallory Towers and Famous Five were the top favourites. It appealed to me since it was always a group or a clique! Again the only child syndrome!

I was also an only grandchild for 16 years and surprisingly for the time in Sri Lanka, I had a working grandmother. She was the source of my books because on every visit to her office which I used to do very often (these were very relaxed days) and she was working at the Port in Colombo as a telephone operator – she used to take me out to the closest bookshop and buy me two books. I think it was done with the idea of keeping me quiet and it worked. I can’t remember my parents buying me books other than for Christmas.

Alison: I know that at about 11 or 12 I read lots and lots of Agatha Christie novels and really enjoyed those. However the first really grown up book (in that it was much harder to read than other things) that I read about this time was Jane Eyre. It is still probably my favourite book of all time – I have read it four times – my most recent reading of it was just before Christmas when I sat up till 2am tears pouring down my face – of course I knew what was going to happen I had read it three times before – and seen many different TV and film adaptations – but I still couldn’t put it down. Each time I have read it I have got more from it – it is a book that gets better with every reading. I look back now and wonder what I got from it back then when I was about 11 or 12. I was at the start of five unhappy years at an all-girls secondary school. I often struggled to fit in, and although I had some good friends we were all a bit of a misfit bunch. Something about Jane really resonated with me I think, I loved her friendship with Helen, her romance with Mr Rochester, the way she stood up to horrid Aunt Reed. I found a small pale friend in Jane Eyre – part of that awkward 12 year old probably wanted to be her. 

Mystica: Surreptitiously reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover at around 13 and not having a clue only knowing it was not quite the done thing.

I was extremely lucky that just down our road we had a “lending library”. It was run by a rather old lady who I later discovered had a huge library and turned it into a financially rewarding scheme. I used to borrow all kinds of books and she never remarked on my rather catholic tastes but with Lady Chatterley’s Lover she sort of hmphed and did mention that it was not quite the thing I should read. Of course I was more interested than ever but it did go over my head at the time and even on a later read I could never imagine what the fuss was all about. Relationships between the upper and lower classes in society were always existent from time immemorial – now why the hoo ha?

Alison: Well I’m not sure about setting me off in a particular direction, but there was a book which unleashed a fascination in me. Sometime in my 20s – I’m not exactly sure when, I read The Raj Quartet. The first novel is of course The Jewel in the Crown. The Raj Quartet set me off on a bit of a mini obsession for a few years. Indian literature! I began reading a lot of Asian lit, I particularly liked things set around the time of the Raj – as it horrified and fascinated me in equal measure. I have read the whole of The Raj Quartet twice – and I watched the TV series many years ago – it’s a series I know I will read again. I know I will never get to go to India – even if I ever had the money – which I don’t suppose I will have – I know I would hate modern India – the heat the noise the chaos and the poverty – it isn’t for me – but I have always been fascinated by India – and I love hearing about it, and generally prick up my ears if I hear it mentioned in the news. I often watch documentaries about India, I love Indian food (don’t eat it often – calories!) and Indian culture. I don’t read as much Indian literature as I did at one time now, although I do from time to time, I recently read a couple of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala novels – and I have been intending to re-read Paul Scott’s Staying On for ages. 

Mystica:  I cant think of a book in my 20s but I could say at 16 Pride and Prejudice definitely changed me. I began to love literature in a slightly more formal manner.

English Literature was one of the subjects I studied for my Advanced Levels. With The Cherry Orchard, which I considered boring, and Six Ages of English Poetry, this was another of the subscribed texts. I fell in love with the written word with Pride and Prejudice and my A level text is still with me. Dog eared and pencilled notes in the margins along with all sorts of scribbles from fellow students. Very nostalgic when I look at it now.

Alison: In January 2012 I read The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton – I absolutely loved it. I read it breathlessly and didn’t want it to end – such great writing, and such wonderful storytelling – Lilly Bart is a wonderfully flawed and beguiling character – a tragic figure who became unforgettable for me. I think I had read The House of Mirth before – when I was quite young – but it hadn’t clicked – I wasn’t ready for Wharton. Following my reading of The House of Mirth that second time, I went on to read three more Edith Wharton novels and have about five more TBR. 

I first came to blogging via LiveJournal several years ago – I didn’t really blog much – my book reviews were very short and not especially well thought out. I would talk about personal stuff too – which I wasn’t always comfortable with – and my enthusiasm for it came in fits and starts. Then about 18 months ago I decided to give blogging a proper go and transfer what had become just a book journal to WordPress. I transferred all my LiveJournal stuff over to WordPress and effectively started again. Now I kind of wish all my old badly written posts had been deleted, rather than transferred over – but there they are, for anyone to see. Having started a book blog at WordPress I have simply been trying to develop it – connect with people and improve. It has been great – time consuming, but I have enjoyed it. I have been considering whether blogging has changed my reading habits – I think it must have had some effect – though overall I have continued to read what I want to – but I think what I want to read has often been influenced by other bloggers. I have started to receive the occasional review copy from publishers – but I really don’t want to get too caught up with all of that – I have so many books of my own I want to read. One of the things that has happened as a result of my blogging about books, is that I have been made to stop and think about what I have read carefully, fully appreciating the writer’s craft and the effect it had on me. It’s a lovely way to help retain the memory of great books. 

Mystica: I came to blogging through Sakura of Chasing Bawa. When I saw the title of her blog I knew she had to be Sri Lankan and when I went and read her blog, commented and got helped in return, it enabled me to start my own.

English print books are available in this part of the world but it tends to stay with the popular authors only. Plenty of Grisham, Patterson and recently the paranormal and fantasy seem to be popular (like everywhere else). I always have a book where I note down books I’d love to read and this is kept very carefully for when I visit Melbourne generally twice a year. If I am lucky three times a year. I then haunt the library in Carnegie and take out/reserve and try to read as many books as I have on the list. That is how I am able to read some of the latest and the best. My other source is a local library run by an association of British residents here in Colombo. You get gems at times with expatriates who have left behind their volumes. I got to Delafield that way. I would never have got it otherwise – both Colombo and Melbourne were blanks!!!!

Alison: My guilty pleasure – is something old fashioned and suspenseful; I’m not sure how else to describe the particular subsection of crime fiction that I sometimes like. As well as being an occasional fan of what is often described as the Golden Age of Crime, I love Sherlock Holmes and some (though by no means all) historical crime fiction. I also love some of the old Victorian suspense novels. I’ve already mentioned Sherlock Holmes, a massive comfort read for me along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, but I also love other old fashioned mystery and suspense tales – and sometimes go looking for obscure things on Project Guttenberg and manybooks.net – one of the joys of the dreaded ereader is that there are lots of such things to be downloaded. I currently have a couple of them waiting for me on my Kindle one is called The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace another is The Camera Fiend by E.W. Hornung, I anticipate them with a delicious shiver – I love those kind of books that make you want to lower the lights and curl under a blanket with a hot drink.  I recently read The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux – brilliant stuff.

Mystica:  [Mystica chose to surprise people with her life story, instead!] I have worked in the field of abandoned/orphaned children and though not directly active any more in the field, my contacts with the children of the Home in which I originally worked give me enormous pleasure and happiness. They are all young adults now and the fact that they are almost all of 42 in contact with me makes me very happy.

Apart from children I work full time. We have a couple of agricultural properties and they are in different parts of the country so I am permanently on the road! We cultivate tea, rubber, mandarin oranges, papaw, chillies and vegetables, coconut and pineapple. I enjoy agriculture very much – though I hardly get my hands dirty but I like the quietness of these properties and getting away from Colombo is always a pleasure.

As for an unexpected book, Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach made me stop and think.

Mystica on Alison’s choices: Carrie’s War – the WWII era is something I like very much myself and I am fascinated how children were sent so far away from their homes to absolute strangers. Imagine today ever even considering something like this. We do not allow our children to even talk to a stranger, and imagine them living with them. This was a book I felt a bit uneasy over. Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy which I just finished deals with the same theme of a little girl sent to a family in Ireland but where she had such a wonderful time that they became her real, actual family. I feel the reader likes matters of history for them to pick this one.

Jane Eyre – a classic read. A mix of the romantic and fantasy!

The Raj Quartet – I do so like novels about colonial India. I never tire of reading stories from different angles. Here an Indian lover is certainly the exception rather than the rule in staid, prim British circles. I would love this series too.

The House of Mirth – this was a tough one for me to assimilate. Too much of drama, too many highs and lows and the death of Lily in such circumstances seemed very staged.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room – I thought of Agatha Christie right away when reading the synopsis of this book. Felt very much like her books! I’d like this one myself.

Sasha is a blogger I was introduced to during one of my occasional ‘please tell me about new bloggers!’ posts, and I’m so glad I was – Sasha and the Silverfish is a blog out of the ordinary, and written so wonderfully.

Vicki: Absolutely! My father is afflicted by bookmania. I defy anyone to tell what colour are our walls, floors and anything that stood still too long, so covered is everything by books. It’s definitely genetic: a house without books is no home of mine. I am also the oldest child, so benefited from all the childhood literacy experimenting that high-achieving parents could inflict. My mother read me a lot of poetry, and I still have my copy of Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1973) — the cover features exactly the sort of demure miss into which my parents, with the assistance of Laura Ashley, would fashion me.

To grow up without fear of poetry is a great gift. The Opie’s magisterial edition (do you know about the remarkable Opies?) falls open at my favourite childhood poem, Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, that grand championing of interspecies miscegenation: “Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl! / How charmingly sweet you sing! / O let us be married! too long we have tarried: / But what shall we do for a ring?'”

Any book featuring a cat was always welcome: Paul Gallico’s Jennie represents my first heartbreak. More happily, my parents gave me their childhood books: Captain W. E. Johns’ Biggles books from my father (austerity editions, with dust-wrappers carefully covered in brown paper) and Ruby Ferguson’s Jill books from my mother. Persephone fans will recognise Ferguson’s name from the delightful Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary. Jill was a pony-mad gal, fetchingly attired in jodhpurs and neat blouse, who liked nothing better than to muck out a stable. Do all girls pretend their bike is a pony?! With my pocket money I added books that proved that girls could achieve anything if they were bright, adventurous and fearless: Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew were favourites. I also adored boarding school stories, especially Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, from which I began hazily to comprehend the value of foreign languages – those girls were at a minimum trilingual. These books also fostered a love of history: oh! that thrilling episode where Jo escapes the Nazis and Miss Wilson’s hair turns grey overnight!

Sasha: I was shuttled from my parents’ to my grandparents’ house and then back again until I was nine, but wherever it was that took me in, I was always surrounded by books. Case in point: At my mother’s house, I slept in the bottom bunk bed, because the top held a good portion of my mother’s library (dangerous living, I know). I remember, the first summer I lived with her and my two brothers—my father had left for a couple of months—in a pretty much permanent basis, how she would read to us every night from a Stephen King novel, Eyes of the Dragon. My mother would be reading aloud on the bed, the youngest curled against her side, and the middle brother and I would be listening to her from the little bunker we’d built beneath the bed. A minor character was named Sasha—she was a Queen, the mother of the central characters—but I remember the awe that took over me then: “That’s me in that book, who else would be a Sasha?” She was in and out of the narrative too quickly for me, but I do believe my mother indulged me and let those pages drag on.

Vicki: ‘Enjoyed’ is the key. In grade 5 (ten years old) a terrible teacher devoted his class to The Hobbit, illustrated with florid air-brush paintings by his wife, and accompanied by distractingly incompetent music he tortured from a guitar while resting his feet on my desk. (Yes, I was a front desk child.) He wore cowboy boots. Even now, over thirty years later, I am unable to read the name ‘Tolkien’ without a shudder. I blame that bloke (the teacher, not the unwitting Tolkien) for almost wholly closing my mind to fantasy, epic, challenge lit., etc. And do not ask my thoughts on cowboy boots.

It was at the local library that, in my early teens, I discovered Agatha Christie, who I consider my first enjoyable grown-up writer. I could happily wallow in crime fiction for the rest of my reading life: it is a source of great comfort when inspiration lacks or life frets.

Or do we mean Proper Adult Books? In my final year of high school — seventeen years old — I was allowed to pick a reading project. I chose D.H. Lawrence (why?!), and it was agreed that I could read Lady Chatterley’s Lover as long as I brought in a note from my parents to say that was OK. I remember their laughter, as LCL (orange Penguin edition) has sat openly on the bookshelf in the loo (yes, we have books in the bathroom), next to Peyton Place, my entire life. I had definitely already read the ‘good’ bits. I remain a Lawrence fan, perhaps because of the step he represents towards adulthood. 

Sasha: Reading was pretty much bred into the family, so I had a wealth of “grown-up” books at my disposal. I don’t ever remember anyone telling me that there were some books I wasn’t allowed to read; it was open season for my thirsty little dork-heart. One summer, while I was still living with my grandparents, I discovered a tidy stack of romance novels: Eighties high aesthetics, the bodice-ripper-iest plots ever. From this stack, the very first romance I ever read: The Duchess by Jude Deveraux. It was utterly fascinating; I think I saw it as the grown-up world’s approximation of the fairy tales I’d devoured. I read and reread that little yellowing paperback until it fell apart.

But, again, the Deveraux still had that un-real feel to it. I saw it as this (instinctively forbidden-to-me) fairy tale for adults. It was when I read my mother’s copy of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic that I fully plunged into “grown-up reading.” My father, when he saw me reading it, asked my mom, “Isn’t that too adult for her?” And my mother shrugged, and let me be. There’s this scene in Practical Magic that has one of the lead characters rush to this man’s house, madly possessed by love. Basically: They had sex in the hallway. It was brief and it was hardly fairy tale-romantic, but it was so suffused with feeling, with realness. I remember looking up from that scene a little disquieted. I’d felt betrayed. My mother had read this book, knew what it contained—countless people had, I assumed. They all knew; even my father, who didn’t read but had an inkling. I had read that scene again, and thought, “This was what the world’s been keeping secret from me.”

Vicki: My late twenties were terrific and terrifying: I went to Cambridge (the UK one) to do a PhD in classical studies when I was 25, and stayed for five years. Living in a college with super-smart people enormously influenced my reading, as did access to one of the best libraries in the world. The biggest bookish changes in my life at this time were, typically, pretentiously name-droppy: literary theory in softer guises (Umberto Eco; Jorge Luis Borges) and women’s/gender studies (I remember being dazzled by Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue). If I must single out one book that recalls this time, it was a dear friend’s recommendation of Microserfs by Douglas Coupland: a classic mid-1990s’ text, with its nerdy protagonists, quirky cleverness, IT start-ups, Lego walled offices, deeply cynically romantic streak, and the sense that anything was possible. It well summed up that era of my life. (I still want a Lego office.)

Sasha: This is telling, but Roland Barthes’ utterly beautiful A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments immediately comes to mind. I first read it when I was seventeen, fresh from a summer (why is it always the summers with me?) of first loves and other life-changing shenanigans. In the six, seven, years hence, I’ve gone back to it over and over. My copy—which my grandfather hunted for in the weeks following a heart surgery—is festooned with so many different iterations of myself. I am all over the margins, all over this book: Different pens, different Sashas, conversations between the marginalia. I’m obsessed with this. How breath-taking can a loving be? How can we elevate so trivial a pain such as waiting for one’s date, running about twenty minutes late? How can we further stretch that first glimpse of skin against the beloved? (A less active influence, but perhaps a more pervading one, is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. A very, very, very young and rather bored me stole it from my mother’s dresser a long time ago, and dear Jane has been a constant in my life ever since. It’s not an opposite of Barthes’ ideals, but there’s a different (more indomitable!) strength to how Brontë paints a love. To one’s self, and especially when a love for another could jeopardize that. A love that’s more quiet but no less passionate, no less assured of itself.)

Sasha: Blogging’s done much to the dynamics of my own reading. The best part is “being” with people who understand how important, how intrinsic, reading is to you. It’s always been this solitary creature, bibliophilia, and our corner of the internet takes an edge off that solitude. You’re assured that somewhere out there, someone has his/her head buried in a book—one that you liked, maybe even recommended—and all is well.

I have the internet, then, to thank for bringing me Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar—something I would have only picked up under duress pre-blogging. Pre-meeting people I like and whose reading tastes I respect and even jive with. Strayed’s collection of columns, essentially, is this quietly galvanizing text on taking a chill pill, on learning to accept things about yourself like your love for solitude, on realizing that loneliness exists but there are ways to get rid of it and only if you want to, on sharing pain and on sharing joy. And I think it’s only fitting that my friends and partners-in-crime in book blogging directed me to this book. I have, since then, tried to push physical copies to my friends.

Sasha: Another thing I’m very thankful for about this book blogging business—a close second to the joy of “meeting” like-minded people the world over—is that it allowed me to get over whatever insecurities or self-consciousness or even shyness about the reading I do. Anyone who’s spent three minutes on my blog or on my Goodreads or on my Twitter knows what I like to read. It’s hard to feel ashamed about reading erotica or pop culture treatises or autobiographies of MMA fighters or comic books anymore, at this point, haha. That’s the thing: You’re sharing such a big part of yourself to the world, through the books you read and what you choose to say about them, and the world just grins madly back at you.

Sasha on Vicki’s choices: Eek, I am going to make a cake of this, hahaha. I have read none of these books or authors, but Lawrence and Heyer are in the more immediate section of my to-read shelves. I was drawn to them because of their promise of quiet, even dignified, sensuality, so perhaps mysterious reader felt the same way about them? Another thing I’m noticing is the breadth between publication dates, even styles of writing. On one hand, we’ve got a straight-up literary classic in Lawrence—and then we slide into Coupland for some contemporary shock. (The children’s verse is pretty much cultural canon, and it’s amazing that this book’s even been passed down—and do we really even need to contrast this with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, hahaha.) Also: Lazarus is Dead is now on my to-read pile, thank you very much.

Lisa is one of my newest favourite bloggers, over at TBR 313 – one of those bloggers whose taste so often overlaps with mine, and whose recommendations are always much prized!

Barbara: My dad and his mum my gran were both readers and dad read a lot to me when I was young. We didn’t have too many books around the house but my sister and I both had lots of books on shelves our rooms. I have always loved libraries and wrote about my initiation into that ‘wonderland’ here.

I simply loved Enid Blyton stories from Mary Mouse, through Noddy and the Magic Faraway Tree, to the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Island (etc.) of Adventure. It wasn’t until I was adult that I was amazed to be informed that these books were considered “unsuitable reading material for children”.

However, much as I loved Blyton’s books for my first choice I have chosen a completely different, hopefully “acceptable reading material” book. It’s A.A. Milne’s “When we were very young and Now we are six”. I can picture now the exact edition and the place in that Children’s Library where I stood when I pulled this book of delights off the shelf and had the thrill of being able to take it home with me!  It is hard to choose just one poem (complete with illustrations) but I think it has to be The King’s Breakfast

Lisa: Yes, I grew up in a house of reading and books.  My father treasured his quiet late-night reading time, after everyone else had gone to bed.  My mother, who worked as a nurse as well as caring for children and home, had less time and energy for reading, but she always had a book on her nightstand.  They must have read to me, but I have no memory of it.  I was reading on my own by age four, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve rebelled against being read to.  Just let me read it for myself!   When I was six, my father bought me Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  I still remember that trip to the store, and the book’s bright yellow cover.  I read it over and over, completely caught up in Laura’s pioneer life, travelling with her family in a covered wagon to build that little house on the vast prairies.   I read it and the sequels so many times that my dad took them away from me for a while, putting them up on a high closet shelf.  A day or so later, unable to bear the separation, I checked one out of the school library. For some reason, I felt the need to call home to announce what I’d done, rather than just reading it at school or sneaking it into the house.  I don’t remember the consequences, but I got the books back eventually, and I have copies on my shelves today.  I know her books are part of my love for history, the focus of my studies in college and graduate school, which led me to a career working in archives.

Lisa: I was introduced to Jane Austen by the 1980 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, with David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie.  I was seventeen or so when I first read Emma.  Despite some struggles with Austen’s language, I was soon immersed in the story.  I have such a vivid memory of the shock I felt when I realized how completely Austen had hoodwinked me – I had been just as blind as Emma, falling for Frank Churchill’s charm and his deceptions, and with the speed of an arrow I too realized the danger of Harriet’s love for Mr. Knightley.  It was a moment of pure delight.  My mother gave me a Penguin edition of Emma for Christmas that year.  We always opened presents after Midnight Mass, and I stayed up the rest of the night re-reading it, so thrilled to have my own copy.  Reading was very much a refuge at that point in my life.  I was attending a small high school, where I was on the fringes, not one of the popular crowd, subject to some teasing that I took very much to heart.  I had always had my nose in a book, for the sheer joy of reading, but now books became a shelter and a consolation as well.  I usually had one open under my desk in class, whenever I could get away with it, and in the halls and the lunchroom.

Barbara: I was very much put off reading classic books at school especially in the first few years when we had to read The Hobbit, Northanger Abbey, Silas Marner etc. I did enjoy Great Expectations which was an O Level set book and also Shakespeare. 

In my early 20s my first library job was at Victoria Lending Library in the City of Westminster and each day I would be shelving books by the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence. I soon decided that there must be something about the classics if they were still so popular and began to borrow and read them for myself. I think it was the Jane Austen titles that I loved best. I devoured them all within days of each other and was so disappointed to realize that there were only 6 completed books. So, although I would select Mansfield Park as my third choice here, since that time I have always loved reading the classics – nice fat ones to really get my teeth into, like the Barchester Chronicles – Trollope is now a great favourite – and in the 1990s this helped to lead me to study for a Masters degree in Victorian Studies where I re-rediscovered (and now love) Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. I feel I have read Dickens all my life but Jane Austen is the only one of these authors whose books I have reread over and over again. Oh dear maybe it’s time to for another reread!

Lisa:  I was 30 when I got my first computer with an internet connection.  One of the first things I put into a search engine was “Georgette Heyer.”  That led me to an on-line discussion group devoted to her books, where I found a lovely group of people who read like I read.  I saw so many new authors recommended there, but none as fervently as Dorothy Dunnett.  People practically swooned as they discussed Francis Crawford of Lymond, the hero of her Lymond Chronicles.  By the third chapter of The Game of Kings, I understood why.  I have never read anything that drew me in as deeply, that took me from laughter to breathless anticipation to shock and despair.  It was impossible to accept that these were fictional characters!  I quickly found a Dorothy Dunnett  listserv, which over the years has introduced me to still more new authors, opening up my reading horizons, particularly in science fiction and fantasy (J.K. Rowling, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis and Diana Wynne Jones), as well as mystery (Laurie R. King and Sarah Caudwell).

Barbara: My reading habits have not really changed that much as I discovered lists made during the early 1970s which, to my surprise, include many authors that I read now. What is so special about my reading these days is that since joining our online book discussion group in 2004 I have been bombarded by great suggestions of authors and books that I’m almost sure I’m going to enjoy because of the reading habits and tastes of other members whose opinions I value and whose taste in reading matter coincides almost exactly with my own.

So for my 4th choice it would be very nice to choose the entire contents of the Persephone Books catalogue! (Persephone Books is what brought us all together). However, I know you won’t allow that so I have chosen just one Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski. It is a little more than 2 or 3 years since I first read it so I’ll just extract a small piece from the aforementioned catalogue to whet your appetite :

Hilary Wainwright, poet and intellectual, returns after the war to a blasted and impoverished France in order to trace a child lost five years before. The novel asks: is the child really his? And does he want him? These are questions you can take to be as metaphorical as you wish: the novel works perfectly well as straight narrative. It’s extraordinarily gripping: it has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller while at the same time being written with perfect clarity and precision.
Interestingly, my second favourite Persephone is Still Missing which is also about a ‘little boy lost’ in an entirely different place, time and circumstances. 

None of this goes anywhere towards explaining why I took to blogging! That just developed from my interest in travel and uploading photos to Flickr. I wanted to add more and more links and comments and discovered that I could do this easily through a blog hosting site where I’m prompted to supply the relevant information.

Lisa: It was from the Dunnett list that I first learned of Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing.  Reading it felt like a conversation about books that I wanted to go on forever.  I had never met anyone who read Anthony Trollope, or had any luck convincing anyone to read him, so her chapter on his books would have been riches enough.  She introduced me to Patrick Leigh Fermor and re-introduced me to Nancy Mitford.  She reminded me of the pleasures of reading diaries, starting with the Rev. Francis Kilvert’s.  She explained why she doesn’t care for Dorothy L. Sayers or Terry Pratchett.  I craved more of that kind of book talk, not necessarily focused just on one author, even the great ones like Heyer or Dunnett.  The search for that type of conversation led me first to reading blogs, and nervously posting comments.  I soon realized though that I wanted to talk about what I was reading as well.  That feeling grew so strong that one day I just sat down and created a blog – naming it for all the TBR books stacked around me, in a vain hope it would help me reduce those stacks.

Barbara: Oh dear, I am a sucker for maps and atlases and travel guides and books of lists of best houses, museums, gardens, literary walks, what to see where and the most dog-eared of my books (after 1066 and All That) is probably my latest Road Atlas of Great Britain. My copy of England’s Thousand Best Churches is not far behind in the tatty much-read/loved books stakes. But I think my fifth choice will be from my selection of books by or about people who have lived or live in Paris; Kate Muir, Susha Guppy, Lucinda Holdforth, Collette Rossant, Adam Gopnik, Mrs Robert Henrey, et al., et al.

My Little Paris Kitchen, by Rachel Khoo is just the most delightful book that gets me dreaming about living in the City of Light in a little Parisian attic apartment, flaneur-ing through the streets, window-shopping, sipping tea at Laduree or at street cafes … Rachel is a young British woman who shows us that she has taken that step and moved to Paris. I am not a good cook and not interested in cooking but I love to read her recipes and comments and devour the beautiful pictures of the streets and markets of this still fascinating city.

Lisa: I can’t think of any guilty pleasures with reading, especially since blogging has shown me that, whatever I am reading, someone else has read it too (and has probably already written a great review). My guilt is reserved for those TBR stacks, though it doesn’t keep me from adding to them on a weekly basis – so often now with books I’ve discovered through other bloggers.

Lisa on Barbara’s choices: Based on these titles, if I ever meet this reader, we will have plenty of books to discuss, and I’ll also be taking recommendations from him or her.  She or he has eclectic reading interests but has clearly enjoyed classic literature from a young age, starting with When We Were Very Young  – showing a reading life already off to a great start.  1066 and All That suggests someone with a strong taste for satirical humor and parody (one I share).  A fondness for Mansfield Park is a sign of a discerning Austen reader.  Fanny Price is a difficult heroine, in a very different kind of story, but one rich in character and psychological insights, not to mention the awful Aunt Norris.  Little Boy Lost shows that this reader enjoys 20th-century classics as well.  I had not heard of Marghanita Laski before I started blogging, but the
reviews I’ve read have added her to my TBR lists – and this is the title that I’ve seen most often.  Somehow I have also missed Rachel Khoo (I had to Google her name and the title; now I want my own copy).  If this is the guilty pleasure, or it would surprise people, then I’d have to guess that this reader isn’t fond of cooking, or maybe travel – or else doesn’t usually watch TV!

Peter is better known to the blogosphere as Dark Puss (in comments) or Morgana’s Cat at his blog.  And he is second only to my father (another Peter) is tirelessly trying to get me to read about science!

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.

Pam: I grew up in a small country town of 5000 people in mid Michigan during the 1950s and 60s. We had a big bookshelf in the “den” which is what that room was called back then. We had books on the shelves but from what I remember they were books about raising babies (Dr. Spock), a set of Encyclopaedias and a few other books that my mother read. I don’t remember having classics in the house and I never remember ever being read to. My family centred around my father’s military career and my mother hosting dinner parties and collecting antiques to impress people to further his career. It was only my sister and I until my brother arrived when I was 12 and nobody ever read books except me.

Hosting a military career involves a great deal of alcohol and partying and living in our house was quite like living with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Down the street, only a block away was a small library I used to hide out in to escape the chaos and I don’t remember the old cranky librarians liking children very much. Especially if they spoke. I read everything in the children’s section and my favourites were the books that lined a separate shelf on wheels, shelves on both sides of biographies written for children. I read the biographies of Madame Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, John James Audubon and would spend weekends building things, pretending to blow up labs inventing things to change the world (mainly coloured water) and studying birds and insects in the back yard. I also read everything I could get my hands on regarding dogs and horses. Black Beauty was my touchstone and in the winter we’d build snow horses instead of snowmen and put blankets over them for saddles and pretend we were riding the Grand National Steeplechase (National Velvet) until our bottoms froze so much we had to go into the house and warm up.

Peter: Yes a very book-oriented one as my parents had a fairly large library for flat dwellers (a few thousand volumes). We had most of the classics of (British) literature, a large collection of post-war Penguins and a good collection of books by 20th-century European writers (in translation). My parents certainly did read to me, mainly my father I think from (distant) memory – certainly I remember being read A.A. Milne, Paddington, The Hobbit, etc. by him.

A favourite from childhood? That’s not so easy as it was rather a long time ago! However I do remember with pleasure Paddington Abroad as it was somewhat contemporary with my earliest memories of going to France by car (though we used the ferry not an aircraft) and I remember well many of the aspects (now mainly lost) of France that Bond describes so well. Given the number of road repair signs and “deviation” notices that there were in those days I did find it funny that in the book they spent a lot of time looking for the town of “Gravillons”.

Pam: At the age of 12 my brother gave birth to my brother and I was pretty much his carer after that. My parents moved us to the country and we had horses and my world was filled with them and my little brother.
I remember I loved books that had to do with the hard lives of immigrants moving into New York city around the time of the World Wars. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith led me to read everything written by her. I had a fascination with the civil war and read Andersonville and Gone With The Wind. I saw more films probably than books because there was a local theatre in this small town and we’d see a different movie every week.

My mother owned the entire set of Agatha Christie books though I never read one as they were her books. She also read Harold Robbins and the latest crime writers of the day. I don’t remember anyone at all in my life who ever said to me, “You must read this book” with any enthusiasm. None of my friends read until I reached grade 11 and 12. Our teachers had more enthusiasm for using the old hickory stick to stop us talking so we didn’t dare show much enthusiasm and everything was about farming, sports and getting your homework done which was quite boring. In hindsight I would have killed for a reading mentor as I know I would have read anything put in front of me.

Peter: Looking into my dimming crystal ball … I think probably Claudine at School the first published novel of Colette. As a pupil at a boys school and a teenager (I think I was probably 14 when I read this) there was clearly a lot to fascinate me in this coming of age (and homoerotic) story and which of us at that age would not warm to at least some aspects of Claudine the rebellious “teenager”! The quality of writing, though not Colette’s finest, the wonderful descriptions of the Burgundian countryside, of which I had some familiarity, the French sensuousness all struck a chord with me. It certainly gave me a lifelong love of Colette’s writing and chapeau to my parents for having this book on their shelves for me to find.

Pam: I can’t say any book directed my work life at all. I decided to become a speech pathologist once I began Central Michigan University because I knew I could get a job anywhere, make a good income and get out of Michigan. My husband and I moved to Florida just after we both graduated from school to begin our first jobs and then I read the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and romance novels as I was newly married and as there wasn’t really a decent library in the city I lived in I had to buy books and we didn’t have a lot of money. I also loved Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Television (James Herriot series was on then) and films dominated my time. James Herriot books were such a major influence we actually holidayed in Yorkshire and met the man one summer.

 It was also the first time I ever met and worked with African American people and I did crave to know more of their history. Richard Wright was by far my favourite writer in this genre and Native Son continues to be my favourite African American book. I was quite political against injustice and no doubt the Roots book by Alex Haley that came out influenced my knowledge of what a racist country the United States was. I liked stories about the development of the unions in equal rights for women in the workplace as well as rallying for women, minorities and animal welfare. To this day I still have a strong interest in these issues which still have a long way to go.

Peter: That’s a hard question! I read a great number of novels, perhaps mainly by European or US authors rather than British ones and looking back I do not easily find one that leaps out as a favourite. My direction in life has not, I think, been driven by literature. Perhaps I might nominate Nice Work by David Lodge as one of my favourites (it is one of his that has stayed the course, some are too much of their time to be good reads today).

Pam: I came to blogging and reading more once I retired. Not much in my life directed me to studying the arts. I had a very latent interest in the arts and literature but have always been a better student in technology and science. I would find it easier to dissect a frog or build a computer than read Jane Austen. I wanted to reverse all of that and learn about this vast field I had little knowledge of. The amount of literature I have learned from book blogs, for free, is mind blowing. I follow a great number of blogs and when I get tired of reading too many ‘ between the wars’ books which has been popular with bloggers I began to search out more of the translated fiction from other countries. I also began collecting Penguin books and I love to go in my library and look at the 2000 books there that line my shelves, all in their orange, green, blue and handle them, read some of them, though I don’t blog about many of them. I feel Penguin books have led me through a social history of not only the UK but other parts of the world through the authors chosen at the time. I would love to read them all but there are too many other published books I enjoy equally and I tend to get caught up in them as well.

The biggest change in my reading habits is that now a single day doesn’t go by that I don’t read something but I do get depressed at how much I have missed in the field of literature and how much catching up I have to do. As I’m now in my 60s I am conscious of time going by and how much is out there. It is probably why I enjoy other people’s reviews so much because at least I get a flavour of different writing.

Peter: Kafka on the Shore without a doubt! I’ve read a number of Murakami’s books over the last five years (and liked all of them) but in this book he really weaves the most magical and powerful story imaginable. It also introduced me to the work of an earlier Japanese author Natsume Soseki as the character Kafka reads his works in the private library in which he takes refuge. A book of outstanding invention and with many of the themes that appear in other books by Murakami (cats, music, sexuality, popular culture, suspense, magical realism) coming together perfectly.

Blogging? That’s easy! A well known (and much admired) blogger of my acquaintance suggested it to me. I’m not sure it has changed my habits much (although perhaps I read more slightly more thoughtfully now) except that because of it I take part in an on-line book group and thus read books that I might not have chosen for myself.

Pam : My guilty pleasure is going into a bookstore and buying a book merely because I love the cover. No idea what the book is about but if the cover appeals I will often buy it. For some reason if there is a cat or a donkey on the cover or it is a European village I may buy it. Fortunately I don’t come across many books with donkeys on the cover.   I also love travel books that have an interesting way of seeing the world. I love stories where people travel for months or years on a motorbike, walking, bicycling or with an animal. I have a strong sense of adventure and I assume that comes from all those very young years of only reading the stories of adventurers, inventors and explorers that were available in our small local library. I imagine everything else I would have enjoyed would have been heavily censored by the libraries as they were in the 50s and 60s in the USA. I’m making up for lost time now and loving it. I owe a great deal to the bloggers of the world for opening my eyes.

Peter: I don’t have “guilty” pleasures! A surprise? I still read Tove Jansson’s Moomin books as I think they (some of them anyway) work well as adult literature as well as the children’s books they are generally assumed to be.

Peter on Pam’s choices:  I’m not at all sure how to deduce anything about the choices of my “partner”. Black Beauty and the love of books with donkeys on the cover might indicate a fascination with horses (and their kin), though Black Beauty is a common enough choice as a favourite children’s book. The books by Smith and Wright are both 20th-century US novels set in large US cities; perhaps that indicates a US citizen or at least a greater familiarity with US literature than I have. Interested to read that Penguin Books are a recent favourite; perhaps that also suggests a non-UK domicile. Anyway I’m sure that whoever it is is probably a far better (and far better known) blogger than I am!

Well, one book review down (read it; the book is great!) and already I’m turning my attention to other matters – the very-much-delayed fourth series of My Life in Books.  It was another victim of DPhil-craziness, and I’ve had an inboxful of wonderful responses for a while.  So, from Monday to Sunday next week, another 14 bloggers will be telling you about their lives in books.

If you haven’t read any of the previous series (all available here) or seen the original TV show, then here’s a quick breakdown: each blogger talks about a book which was important to them at four stages in their life (childhood, early adulthood, 20s/30s, blogging) and then admits to a guilty pleasure or a much-loved book which might surprise people.

Here’s the twist: I pair up bloggers, but don’t tell them who their partner is.  I do tell them the books their partner has chosen, and ask them to guess or assess what sort of person is revealed by their choices…

So, I’ll see you in a week’s time!  Make my visitors welcome – and I hope the bloggers who answered the questions will also chip in and reply to your comments.