Stuck in a Book

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Five! Today’s bloggers are:

Karen, who blogs at Books and Chocolate

Bibi, who blogs at Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

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. 

Karen: Growing up, most of the books in my house were kid’s books. I don’t remember my parents reading to me, but I know we had a lot of children’s books around so there was always something to read. And my parents paid extra for us to belong to the town library, which was better than the county library we were entitled to use. I remember my parents bringing large boxes to the library to carry all the books home.

One of my childhood favorites was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I desperately wanted to be like Claudia and run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum — in fact, many of my childhood favorites were set in New York, so it’s no wonder I always dreamed of living in a big city. 

Bibi: My parents didn’t read to me and the minute I learnt to read I was off on my own with books and didn’t want them read to me. My mother would make up brilliant bedtime stories off the top of her head (usually suspiciously related in circumstance to my own life with some sort of lesson involved – not as terrible as it sounds!) The house had a lot of books, but mainly my Dad’s non-fiction hardbacks, which I didn’t read much. He would take me to the library every Saturday and I’d get my books there. My mother adored books and poetry and I did read her beloved Virginia Woolf novels, but one of the great ironies of our family life is that it was giving birth to her bibliophile daughter that stopped her reading due to lack of time. Possibly why I’ve never had children, although friends assure me it is possible to combine the two!

Karen: The first grown-up book I remember reading was Gone With the Wind, in the sixth grade. I’m a fast reader and it didn’t take me very long, but it’s not a difficult novel, though I’m sure parts of it went over my head. I’d seen the movie on TV so I knew the basic plot, which helped. I don’t remember much about myself at that age other than I was really bookish, and there wasn’t much to do where I grew up. I was a library aide in middle school and I was always reading.

Bibi: I read Wuthering Heights when I was 12 and thought it was absolutely awful *ducks for cover* but a couple of years later I decided to broach the Brontes again and I tried Jane Eyre. So I think I was about 13-14 years old and definitely in the market for overwrought romance. Although I’ll never be a huge Bronte fan, Jane Eyre opened up the classics for me. It showed me they were something that could be read and enjoyed. You didn’t have to be super-clever to understand the language and they were great stories. So from there I went on to read a lot of the classics felt that part of literature open up to me. 

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Karen: I didn’t do too much pleasure reading in my 20s and early 30s, and what I remember reading was mostly mysteries and thrillers. I was working as a pastry cook so most of what I read was food related. One of my all-time favorite food writers is Laurie Colwin, and her book Home Cooking food essays (with recipes) is one of my favorites — my kids love it also and I had to buy my youngest daughter her own copy. Colwin was also a wonderful fiction writer, and I’ve read all her novels and short stories as well. 

Bibi: This is the only question I’ve had to really ponder and its made me realise how much of my formative reading was in my younger years! Reading Jeanette Winterson as a teenager set me off down an experimental fiction path, reading Isabel Allende around the same time was what got me into translated fiction, these alongside Margaret Atwood when I was in sixth-form were strong feminist voices and saw the start of my collecting Virago Modern Classics – picking something from the years after that has proved much more tricky! 

Karen: I’ve really been enjoying the novels of Margery Sharp (which I found through your blog, Simon!) I started with Cluny Brown and have since read four more of her novels I’ve enjoyed all of them but I think Cluny Brown is my favorite so far, though I also loved The Flowering Thorn. And I’ve discovered you can read many of them online for free via Archive.org.

I started blogging nearly ten years ago. A friend from a book group had her own blog and I was an unemployed librarian with a lot to say about books, so I decided it would be a good outlet. My reading habits have changed mostly because of the books I’ve discovered through other bloggers I follow — it’s how I discovered Persephone Books, Viragos, and Furrowed Middlebrow. I really love mid-century women’s fiction and I don’t know if I would have discovered so many of these books because most of them are out of print and not always available in bookstores and many libraries — in fact, I hardly ever buy new books any more, nearly everything I want to read is used and out of print. But I still have far too many unread books on my shelves! 

Bibi: This year I read A Month in the Country and I thought it was just beautiful. My edition comes in at slightly over 80 pages and the fact that JL Carr can write about such immense themes with so much humanity and concision is just astonishing. 

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Karen: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman – totally unlike my usual reads. I don’t really read a lot of fantasy, but I do sometimes enjoy low fantasy because I don’t have the patience for all the world-building in high fantasy. I prefer when weird and fantastic things happen to normal people. Anansi Boys is just brilliant, and the audio version by Lenny Henry is even better than reading the print copy. 

Bibi: I don’t know if this will surprise people as it fits with my love of concise writing (in fact, maybe my love of Middlemarch is more surprising!) but I always surprise myself with how much I love Ernest Hemingway. Although I’m not someone who has to like the artist to enjoy the art, I still find myself wishing I didn’t like Hemingway’s work. He was horrible to women, he really liked blood sports, these are not endearing qualities to me. But his writing blows me away. The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read. And that description of Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast where he compares his talent to dust on a butterfly’s wing makes me cry every time.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Karen on Bibi’s choices: Well, the first two books make me think this reader enjoys Victorian novels; from The Alchemist (which I’d never heard of) I’m guessing they enjoy satire. A Month in the Country is just beautifully written — perhaps they enjoy novels set between the wars? And Hemingway isn’t my favorite (more of a Steinbeck fan), but sometimes you just want writing that’s not flowery, straight and to the point.

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Four! Today’s bloggers are:

Ruthiella, who blogs at Booked For Life

Kay, who blogs at What Me Read

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

Ruthiella: I don’t remember either of my parents ever reading to me or my siblings. However, my mother was and is an enthusiastic reader. There were some, but not a lot of, books in the house growing up. I suspect this is more indicative of middle-class American consumer culture in the 1960s than anything else. My niece and nephew have 10 times the books I had as a child.

My mother also took us kids to the library regularly and I checked out the “Little House” series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder repeatedly. My mother has told me since that she was worried that I wouldn’t become a “reader”, but once I picked up The Little House in the Big Woods at age seven or so I began to read voraciously and her worries were allayed.  My favorite of the Little House books is probably Farmer Boy, probably because the childhood of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo, seemed so secure and comfortable compared to Laura’s. I remember reading about how Almanzo and his brother and sisters strung popcorn and cranberries to trim the Christmas tree and thinking how neat that was.

Kay: We had books in out house, but I don’t remember anyone else reading except my Dad, and I think he read mostly on the airplane on the way to business trips. I read voraciously, however, from an early age. My mother told me that when I was only a baby, she came into the room and found me in my playpen holding a book upside down and trying to read it. I have a strong memory of being a small child and wondering what those mysterious symbols were and what they would tell me. I know that I was read to sporadically as a child. When I was a bit older, every once in a while my mother would decide to get us all together to read to us, but I don’t remember that lasting more than a few evenings, and we never finished a book. However, I am sure that I had storybooks read to me when I was little. One of my most exciting days was when I had learned to sign my name, which was when I could get my own library card. My mother took me to the library to get it and select the first books that I checked out myself, and I found this event so special that when I was a teenager I took my own much younger little brother for his first card, too. I used to pick out books that had beautiful pictures, although having pictures of fluffy rabbits and other animals or fairies was also important.

The books I remember from my younger childhood as being important were an old children’s encyclopedia that had belonged to my mother when she was a child. It had pictures in it of fairies and elves in twisty trees drawn by artists like Arthur Rackham. I used to look at them for hours. The other book was given to me as a gift, Shirley Temple’s Storybook, a book of fairy tales. I think I still have it.

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Ruthiella: The first “grown up” book I ever read was probably Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None which I read in 7^th grade at age 12 while I was a school library aid. It was an easy job and I had lots of time to read during that hour. I remember the book was just randomly on the library table, so I picked it up. This set off a lifelong love for Agatha Christie novels. I’d always enjoyed mysteries (Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Trixie Belden) but this was my first adult crime novel for sure.

Kay: I was never censored in my reading, so it’s hard to say what my first “grown-up” book might have been. I’m thinking probably Dickens, perhaps David Copperfield. Certainly that’s the one that sticks in my mind. How old was I when I read that? I’m not sure. Probably about nine or ten years old.

I remember picking out The Idiot by Dostoevsky at the library when I was 11 (I didn’t quite understand what the heck was going on but formed the impression that Russians were really excitable), and about that time, my family started buying me Modern Library books as gifts, so that by the time I finished high school, I had most of the ones that were available at the time. The first really adult books I read were my father’s James Bond novels. When I was about 12, I remember having a discussion with my friends about whether a phrase meant that Bond and the Russian spy in From Russia with Love “did it,” not that we actually understood what “doing it” really meant.

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Ruthiella: I can’t think of any particular book that set me off in a certain direction in life. I am still lacking a direction in life despite being over 50! I didn’t’ read as much in my 20s or 30s as I do now – maybe only 15 books a year on average – I had a social life then!  What I do recall from those decades in terms of reading is falling in love with the tragicomedy of John Irving, the absurdity of Kurt Vonnegut, the gravitas of Graham Greene and the evocative writing of Toni Morrison. Those are the authors I “discovered” in my early adulthood. Oddly, I rarely read any of them now, though I keep meaning to get back to them. So many books, so little time!

Kay: I don’t know that a book ever set me in a direction in life, but I do remember feeling like my head was exploding when I read Benjy’s section of The Sound and the Fury in my late teens or early 20’s. The idea that the author could play with the narration like that I found terribly exciting, and I often enjoy newer novels that are a little experimental.

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?  

Ruthiella: My favorite book of the last few years is probably The Idiot by Elif Batuman.  It was published in 2017 and is about a young woman’s freshman year at Harvard in the 1990s.  I would say it is a real marmite book: you either get it our you don’t. It is a rambling, plotless novel with a self-obsessed, clueless adolescent narrator who thinks way too much about meaningless things and yet I totally identified with her and laughed a lot.  I totally want Batuman to write three more books about the protagonist’s sophomore through senior years.

I came to blogging mostly because I wanted to participate in the Back to the Classics Challenge hosted by Karen at the blog Books and Chocolate. You can also use Goodreads as a link to the challenge, but its easier if you have a blog.

Book blogs certainly have widened my reading microcosm, as has the website Goodreads, Booktube and bookish podcasts. I think my reading is far more varied now. I used to read mostly crime fiction with the occasional literary novel thrown in and almost no non-fiction. I’m still pretty weak on the non-fiction front, but I read a lot more literary fiction now as well as more classics, science fiction, fantasy, historical and even occasionally YA.

Blogs et al have also educated me about reading-adjacent things, like literary terms such as magic realism or bildungsroman, classifications like YA or middle grade,  publishing industry history and book prize shortlists and winners.

Kay: Gosh, this is a hard question. There are so many books I love. I was going to say Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, but then I realized I read it almost six years ago! In general, I am pleased by all of the new reprint publishing companies, such as Furrowed Middlebrow and Persephone Press that have introduced me to women writers like Margaret Oliphant, Dorothy Whipple, and Richmal Crompton (that’s down to your reviews, Simon) from Victorian, Edwardian, and early 20^th century periods that I probably would have never heard of otherwise. I know that doesn’t answer the question.

I started blogging because of book journaling. I had never kept a list of the books I read, but about 15 years ago, perhaps, a friend of mine gave me a book journal as a gift, and I decided I would keep it and write brief notes about each book I read. When I filled up that journal, I bought an ordinary composition book and continued journaling, only I was writing longer notes that were really reviews. Then for some reason I decided to do it online.

I think my reading changed a bit when I was keeping my journals, but it changed most when I set myself several reading challenges for my book blog. I joined the Classics Club because I always read lots of classics, but I also challenged myself to read the shortlists for the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Fiction Prize, and the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize. Even though I have read books from these lists that I didn’t like, I have found many excellent books because of these challenges that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and I feel that the level of books I choose is improving in quality.

I have been keeping my book blog for seven years now, and that has led me to write a more personal blog beginning three years ago, started when I made a big move from Texas to Washington, and most lately a hiking blog for people like me who are not in the best physical condition.

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Ruthiella: I never read The Babysitter’s Club books as a kid. I don’t think they had been written yet. These are books that are aimed at preteen girls, yet I read as many as I could lay my hands on in my 30’s.  And since they are short and I was not a child, I could read three or four of them in an hour or so. I can’t say why, but I loved them.

Kay: Perhaps because I’m not generally a sci fi fan, it would be surprising to people to find that one of my favorite books is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Not so surprising would be to know that a favorite for years has been Middlemarch. And finally, a book I read recently that really impressed me was The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Ruthiella, on Kay’s choices: At first glance of the five titles I felt a real affinity for Reader X. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Charles Dickens, Kate Atkinson and David Mitchell. All three would easily make it into my list of top 10 authors. I realize now I did not mention in them any of my responses because they are all authors I began reading after age 40.

I am impressed that David Copperfield was the first grown up book for Reader X.  Shirley Temple’s Storybook makes me think that Reader X is slightly older than I am? The Sound and the Fury (and Faulkner in general) daunts me.  I am super curious to find out if this title set Reader X off in a certain direction in life and how. Was it the inspiration for a career in literature, writing, or teaching? Or maybe a passion for Southern Gothic?

I would guess that Reader X is an eclectic reader who is not afraid to be challenged by the text or structure (Faulkner, Mitchell) but also loves becoming immersed in a good story (Dickens, Atkinson).

If Reader X hasn’t already dived into Kate Atkinson’s back list, I would recommend they read her Jackson Brodie series starting with Case Histories.  For a standalone novel, I would suggest The Goldfinch by Donna Tart to Reader X since it I found it to be a very compelling and immersive read in a similar way to Life After Life and Cloud Atlas.

Kay on Ruthiella’s choices: I’m guessing this person is female, although maybe boys read Laura Ingalls Wilder. I don’t know. (Sorry if I’m wrong.) I would guess she has varied tastes in literature, likes light reading (Babysitters) as well as something a bit more substantial (Elif Batuman), but also has a sense of humor. Maybe she also has a sense of adventure and an interest in other cultures. For this reader, I recommend Sisters on a River by Barbara Comyns.

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Three! Today’s bloggers are:

Resh, who blogs at The Book Satchel

Jennifer, who blogs at Holds Upon Happiness

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. 

Resh: I’ve heard my mother loved books and was a incurable book worm in her younger days and my father loved medical thrillers and Russian classics. But I have seldom seen them reading; probably work and kids really took a toll. However, I have grown up seeing my retired grandfather spending long mornings, reading books in three languages.

I had a childhood of listening to stories from my grandparents and mother rather than being read to. I was quite happy to read on my own. One of my first beloved series was the St. Clare series by Enid Blyton. I used to fantasise going to a boarding school, having a girl gang and eating midnight feasts (Also about having a twin, but that wasn’t very realistic).

Jennifer: I come from a family of readers. The house was filled with books, we took regular trips to the library where I checked out the highest number of books they would allow (eight, which I thought was a ridiculous limitation) and my mom read aloud to us for years. I am grateful that I seem to have passed on a love of books to my own children. It’s a good thing;  I would have to disown them otherwise!

My favorite book for years and years was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is worth noting that in the U.S. Little Women now refers to both volumes – Little Women and Good Wives – in one edition. I read a copy that was given to us when I was very young, maybe 6, but then, when I was in 2nd grade (about 7) I found a copy in the classroom library and realized the copy I owned was abridged. I was simultaneously horrified and thrilled. How could anyone cut parts out of a book?! But now I had more of a book I loved. However, the teacher thought it was too advanced for me and didn’t want to allow me to read it. I was a painfully shy child but I still remember standing there and arguing with her until she finally gave in and let me take it home. I raced through it and then proceeded to reread it multiple times a year for years and years to come. In fact, I just read it again last year. Comfort reading at its finest. 

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Resh: I started off early with the grown up books (Dickens, Austen and other classics) in my childhood and read children’s books much later in life. I was completely enthralled by Pride and Prejudice that I read in a pocket abridged version first when I was eight, and then discovered a much bigger, unabridged novel at a store some years later. I loved it! The drama, the anguish of ‘will-they-won’t-they’ and of course the Bennett sisters. Nothing much was going on in my life then, except homework, school and dance classes.

Jennifer: My mom loves Jane Austen and used to read Pride and Prejudice over and over. Yes, we are not only a family of readers but also a family of rereaders. Anyway, I picked it up one day and read the first page. I remember that I thought it would be boring but after that first page, I was hooked. I have loved Jane Austen ever since. I don’t remember how old I was but I think I was 9 or 10. I was a very typical little kid but if there was a book anywhere near me I was going to read it no matter what it was. My parents didn’t put many restrictions on my reading except for banning the romance stories in the back of my grandmother’s women’s magazines. It’s all right. I snuck and read them anyway. It was my one act of rebellion.

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Resh: I read The God of small things by Arundhati Roy in my late twenties and ended up loving it and re reading it every year since. Roy brings alive the Indian-ness with her cleverly written words, plays around with time jumps and writes the most lyrical and beautiful descriptions. It took my breath away.

Jennifer: I had a bit of trouble with this question so I am going to cheat and use a book I read before my twenties but also reread regularly after that. It did indirectly change my life. When I first met my husband we were both on vacation in Switzerland. I remember walking through the town doing all the usual getting to know you chat. I thought he was a nice guy but I wasn’t looking for a relationship.  Then he asked me what I liked to do in my free time. I said I liked to read. Instead of the slightly baffled expression I frequently saw when I mentioned books he looked interested and asked me if I had ever read James Herriot’s books. I had and I loved them. I immediately decided this guy deserved a second look. Twenty-eight years later I still think that was a wise decision. 

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?

Resh: I discovered Elizabeth Taylor through A Game of Hide and Seek and I was a wreck when I finished the book. It was such a satisfying read, with beautiful prose and emotional enough to crunch my heart (Yes, I cried).

I started blogging as a distraction when I was at a not-so-good phase in my life. It opened me up to so many new authors, old and new, and amazing translated literature. Probably my before-blogging years stopped at Amazon lists and mainstream authors. Now I am picky and forever in the hunt for good books and under rated gems. Also, it introduced me to digital platforms and magazines that churn out such excellent pieces.

Jennifer: I had an immediate answer to this question. It is One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes. I love it. It is the story of one day in an English village after WWII has ended. It is lyrical and insightful and absolutely perfect. I think everyone should read it. I reread it (of course I do) and every time I am a little afraid it won’t be as good as I remember and every time it is even better. I came across it when I first discovered book blogs.

I was puttering around the internet looking for books to read because I was very frustrated with my small-town library. I came across a few blogs (Simon’s was one of the first) and discovered a whole category of books I had never read or heard of. So many of the book blogs were British and thus reviewed many books I was not familiar with. I was introduced to Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Whipple, E. H. Young, Mary Hocking and many more.  It has deeply enriched my reading life. After a little while reading blogs, I started to think that I wanted my own. I spent a long time dithering about it but I am so glad I finally did it. I enjoy the whole process of blogging and it is fascinating to encounter so many people who love books just as much as I do.

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Resh: I’d recommend The Wonder by Emma Donoghue set in 1800s Ireland. A family claims that their ‘miracle child’ hasn’t eaten food in four months and a nurse is summoned to observe the child. It is a mix of faith, superstitions, folklore and psychology — the reader melts into the narrator— and is an absolutely immersive read.

Jennifer: My kids say I am very predictable in my reading habits and they assume any book I read is set in England during WWII. That isn’t quite true. As proof, I give you To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It has time travel, Oxford, references to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, a Bishop’s bird stump (!!) and lots of nonsense. I absolutely adore it. Doomsday Book, which is set in the same world of time travel and Oxford, is much darker but is also very, very good. 

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Resh on Jennifer’s choices: I think this reader is a lot like me. They can’t be boxed into a particular category of books. They enjoy a bit of everything, realistic stories or something totally different . They might be unpredictable in their reading choices and are always after books that surprise them. I also think they like books set in old worlds more than the contemporary one.

I think they would love Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It is an alternate historic novel set in 19th century England with magic but as a subject of study, ego battles between magicians, Napoleonic wars and over 200 footnotes that add to its delight.

Jennifer on Resh’s choices: This was a very interesting collection of books. I have only read two of them, Pride and Prejudice and A Game of Hide and Seek, so I had to look up descriptions of the others. This reader seems to be someone who likes to immerse themselves in a world and experience how people lived and felt. Emotions seem very important to them. Maybe they are a person who likes to know why people feel a certain way and what life was like for them. Character is more important than action. All of these books portray a certain time period or way of life from boarding school to life in an Indian family. I feel as if this reader is probably British because of the choice of the Enid Blyton books. I am recommending a favorite book of mine that I have read over and over through the years. It is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith which is viewed as an American classic. It is the coming-of-age story of Francie Nolan, a young girl in Brooklyn during the early years of the twentieth century. You are pulled in to her life and emotions and the descriptions of the time and place are evocative. I think it will appeal to this reader. 

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Two! Today’s bloggers are:

Marina, who blogs at Finding Time To Write

Juliana, who blogs at The Blank Garden

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. 

Marina: I grew up in a book-loving household, although my parents were the first in their generation to even go to secondary school, let alone university. My parents read me bedtime stories, especially Romanian fairy tales and children’s classics – although they would doze off long before I fell asleep. One of my favourite childhood books was The Little Prince, although I probably didn’t realise at the time just how sad it was. When I tried to read it to my own children, of course I was bawling and full of tears. My children looked very puzzled..

Juliana: I didn’t grow up in a book-loving household. None of my parents read books. None of them cared for books, really. In fact, they disregarded reading so much, that it was considered harmless. Fiction was never something to be taken seriously in my family. But everyone enjoyed to tell each other stories – particularly ghost tales and family stories – and storytelling was something very powerful that held us together.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren, is the first book that comes to my mind, whenever I am asked about my childhood favourites. Pippi was everything that I wanted to be at the time: red-haired, freckled, independent, “the strongest girl in the world”. She skipped classes whenever she wanted, made fun of the adults, and always resisted to conform to what they expected of her. It was impossible not to fall in love with Pippi!

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Marina: The first grown up book I remember reading was Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. It was on my parents’ bookshelf, because at some point somebody must have recommended all the famous English classics to them. So they bought all of Jane Austen and the Brontes, Vanity Fair and other such books. I don’t think they actually read Moll Flanders, so they had no idea what it was about, and were not aware that it might not be suitable for a 9-10 year old.

Juliana: Believe it or not, the first ‘grown-up’ book I read was actually… the Bible. For a long time, the only books we had at home were medical books, an old Bible, and an encyclopaedia. So, when I was about eight years old, and partly out of boredom and lack of alternatives, I decided I was old enough to set myself the goal of reading the Bible from cover to cover. I treated it as a conventional fictional book, to be read from the first page to the last. I didn’t understand any of it, but it sounded so different from what I had to learn at Sunday school, that I felt I was reading a forbidden book – and that feeling of trespassing was all that I needed to keep reading…

Another ‘grown-up’ book that comes to my mind is Family Ties, by Clarice Lispector – an author who had been recommended to me by a librarian. I was thirteen, and it was the first time I felt that an author had, in a strange way, written something about me that, until then, I had never been able to put into words. Something about feeling lonely, about not fitting in, and about all the things we never find words for. I don’t think I understood this book either, and I don’t remember my thoughts on it. But I remember what I felt.

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Marina: I ended up studying Japanese at university almost by accident (I was planning to study Scandinavian languages) but the book that made me fall in love with Japanese literature and made me stop regretting the Norwegians was the short story collection Hashire Merosu (Run, Melos!) by Dazai Osamu.

One story in that collection in particular completely changed the way I thought about unreliable narrators: it is a story told from Judas Iscariot’s point of view. I attempted to translate it (probably very badly) and it got me writing again (although after I finished university I stopped writing again for many, many years).

Juliana: A book that left a great impression on me in my early 20s was The Life of the Mind, by Hannah Arendt – an unfinished book in which she explored the basic faculties of the mind (contemplation, will, judgment), so as to understand the relationship between thinking and morality. I had been looking for women philosophers, and she was the first that came up on my research. They had this book at my university library, the topic seemed interesting enough, and I had some boring summer holidays ahead of me.

From the first pages, I was completely taken in by Arendt’s her writing style: unlike the dry books I had been reading for Uni, Hannah’s voice was fresh, bookish, passionate, and full of life. It changed the way I thought about academic writing and research; it reminded me of why I had fallen in love with philosophy and ethics; and it gave a new insight on what I wanted to do with my life.

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?

Marina: Blogging has enabled me to discover so many new and marvellous books, so I have lots of new favourites! I started blogging in 2012 as a way to hold myself accountable for writing regularly. So initially my blog was mainly about poems and flash fiction. Then I started reviewing more and more books, especially once I started reviewing for Crime Fiction Lover and Necessary Fiction and other such places. I had to find an outlet for all the books I was reading for personal enjoyment rather than just the ‘review copies’, so I started using my blog for that. My most recent favourite discovery is the Transylvanian trilogy by Miklos Banffy – I became completely immersed in that vanished world.

Juliana: Two recent favourites that come to my mind are There Were No Windows, by Norah Hoult, which I read in 2016, and The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns, which I read in 2017. I would probably never have heard of those books, if I had not been introduced to the book blogging community.

When I started reading book blogs, back in 2006/ 2007, I knew nothing about Persephone Books or Virago Modern Classics – books I am now completely obsessed with! I guess blogging has made literature wider (and wilder) for me – and it surrounded me with kindred spirits who understand and share some of my bookish obsessions.

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Marina: I have such eclectic tastes that I don’t think anything I read would surprise people. Everyone knows I love genre fiction (especially crime) and poetry, but you might not be aware how much I adore T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. I didn’t have a cat when I first read it, but I could tell that T. S. Eliot really knew his feline companions. Of course, it helps that in my student days I was part of a production of the musical Cats, which was considered ‘subversive Capitalism’ at the time and was promptly closed down after just a couple of performances.

Juliana: I think people may be surprised to know that Agatha Christie is one of my favourite authors. When I was a teenager, I read all of Agatha’s books I could find at my local library. Every time I pick one of her books, it feels like coming back home.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Marina on Juliana’s choices: Well, I actually like all of his or her chosen favourites (I nearly chose Pippi Longstocking myself as one of my childhood favourites and I always enjoy relaxing with an Agatha Christie). So I think this is someone who is an eclectic reader, and who likes to challenge themselves intellectually as well as let down their guard occasionally. I would recommend one of my very latest discoveries, which is wonderfully relaxing, but by no means simplistic: Old Baggage by Lissa Evans. It’s amusing, but with underlying sadness – the story of a former indomitable Suffragette who finds herself without a cause in 1928. So she creates one… and gets into trouble with it, for she is a bit like a bull in a china shop.

Juliana on Marina’s choices: I found these choices so intriguing! From the list, I’ve only read The Little Prince (also one of my childhood favourites) and Moll Flanders. Most of the books chosen seem to explore moral questions in a way or another, so this must be a very thoughtful reader… I guess this blogger is someone deeply interested in modern classics and literature in translation – and someone who loves cats! Maybe someone with a British background and with a wide range of interests? It’s difficult to guess… The only thing I know is that this is someone whose blog I should be reading! I see that one of this reader’s recent favourites is a modern classic written by a Hungarian author, so I would recommend The Door, by Magda Szabo, tr. Len Rix (2005): a novel in translation that explores moral questions in a powerful way.

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day One! The first pair this week are:

Karen, who blogs at Booker Talk

Lisa, who blogs at ANZ Lit Lovers

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.

Karen: You’re really testing my memory here! Since my childhood was more than five decades ago I have few recollections of that time. I had to ask my parents to fill in the gaps. Apparently yes there were lots of books around the house and they did read to me. Lots of fairy stories in my early years and later the classics like Little Women, Heidi, Coral Island and Treasure Island.

When I progressed to being able to read myself I used my pocket money to buy just about every boarding school book that existed. A particular favourite was Jane Eyre – it still is, though of course I read it very differently now. As a child I loved the rebel in Jane Eyre – a bit of a theme here since it was the rebel Jo in Little Women that I was drawn to most.

Lisa: Both my parents, but especially my father, nurtured my love of books.  Though I remember my father singing us to sleep, I don’t remember anyone reading to me, but that’s because I can’t remember not being able to read for myself. We had shelves and shelves of books in the house, adults’ and children’s, but even though we always received books at Christmas and birthdays, there were never enough because we were all voracious readers.  So Daddy used to walk us down to the library every Saturday to get some more. We moved a lot when I was a child, but the first thing my father always did was to join us up to the library so it became a lifelong habit.

My favourite book from my childhood was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – and I still have it, inscribed ‘To Lisa with love from Daddy, Christmas 1965’.  I loved this book because I was fascinated by the idea of time travel, and I can remember talking about it with my mother, who thought it could be possible, and my father who (being a scientist) thought it wasn’t… I realise now, too, that I may also have liked it because it had a brave and intelligent female hero, which (although there was Alice) was not common in books for children in those days. 

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Karen: The first I can remember were the novels of Jean Plaidy that I discovered when I was about 12 years old. I couldn’t get enough of those tales of that roguish king Charles II or the intrigues of the Tudor court. They were way more exciting – more real – than all the boring political history about the Reform Act and Repeal of the Corn Laws we got in school

A friend shared my enthusiasm so our walk to school was full of discussion about what we’d read the previous night. We got too carried away however so inevitably arrived after the school bell had sounded.

The enthusiasm I had then for history has never gone away.

Lisa: As I grew older and started reading ‘adult’ books, talking about them with my father became part of our Saturday after-lunch-while-doing-the-dishes routine.  He suggested that I read Nineteen Eighty-Four and then went on to Aldous Huxley.  I was still at school, but rather bored, so these discussions about philosophy and the possible future were the intellectual highlight of my week.

1984, of course, was then still in the future, but in my immediate future as an adult, so it messed, in a good way, with my adolescent anticipation of being an adult and free to do whatever I liked, with a future controlled by faceless authorities. I think that’s what made me interested in (armchair) politics. 

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.

Karen: After university I embarked on a career as a journalist. One of my ‘heroes’ was Keith Waterhouse, a columnist for the Daily Mirror newspaper, one of the biggest selling newspapers in the UK. I’d read his columns throughout my teens, laughing as he held forth on his obsessions with the minutiae of life. He’d rail about shopkeepers whose shop windows advertised “potato’s” and “pound’s of apple’s and orange’s”

His book, Daily Mirror Style became my bible.  In it, he urged journalists to avoid cliches and puns and the ‘purple prose’ that George Orwell so hated. I took his advice to heart. Discovering this book set in train my life-long hatred of the kind of jargon found everywhere in business. Phrases like “mind-set”, “moving forward” and “North Star” are guaranteed to set me on edge. And don’t even get me started on “leverage”.

Lisa: That would be The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. It was a revelation to me, and since I was married and a mother by then, it certainly triggered some lively discussions around the dinner table! I’d been a bit of a feminist without knowing it, but reading Greer gave me a philosophical framework and a legitimacy for the my ideas about gender equity.  

Apparently Greer doesn’t like it when people tell her that she changed their lives, because she thinks that we’re the ones who did the changing, but it’s certainly true in my case, that she triggered changes in what I expected from life and how I was to be treated. That moment when I picked up the keys to our one and only car *without* asking “permission” reconfigured the power relationship in our marriage and ultimately made us both much happier.

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? How did you come to blogging and how has blogging changed your reading habits?  

Karen: I started blogging when I came up with an idea to read all the Booker prize winners and wanted a way to document my experience. What I hadn’t expected was that blogging would introduce me to so many new authors. It made me realise that my reading had a fairly narrow geographic focus; very dominated by British and American writers. Trying to broaden my horizons has led me to some delightful Japanese authors including most recently Yasunari Kawabata whose novel Snow Country I found utterly mesmerising.  

Lisa: Oh, such an impossible question! I’ll tweak it to choosing two standout Australian novels from the last month or two: a superb new novel called The Yield by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch (which I reviewed during Indigenous Literature Week which I host every year), and Invented Lives by Andrea Goldsmith, a local Melbourne author who writes stunning contemporary novels that are always food for thought. 

My route to blogging began with learning how to do it for professional purposes, starting my LisaHillSchoolStuff blog to share resources with other teachers, and, truth be told, to pontificate in occasional rants about this and that. The ANZ LitLovers blog began as a site for an online book group to share their discussions, but that never worked out.  So I just kept it for my own thoughts about the books I read, which I was confident nobody else would ever read, and I was quite startled when I received a request to review a book. And to my astonishment, it just grew from there…

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!

Karen: People who know me and follow my blog are aware that I don’t care much for science fiction, fantasy or anything that smacks of the supernatural. Yet one of my most enjoyable books of recent years was Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. If this is an example of science fiction writing at its best then I could become a convert.

Lisa: The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela by Sisonke Msmiang. This is a favourite because I’ve found myself talking about it such a lot.  Everyone knows Winnie, and everyone has an opinion about her, usually a negative one. But because I’d read The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo Ndebele (2003), which is about the impossible position of so many South African women under apartheid, waiting for long periods of time for the return of their husbands and expected to keep their own lives on hold indefinitely, I had been wondering what it would have been like to be married to a secular saint.

Sisonke Msimang explores this idea further in The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela where she makes the point that “We like our heroines to be courageous, but we don’t want them to be messy”. For me, Msimang’s book is what reading is about, challenging our ideas and making us thinks about the lives of others so different from our own.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Lisa on Karen’s choices: My partner’s first two choices hint that we are perhaps of the same gender and approximate age…

Because Jane Eyre was chosen as a favourite book, I think that my partner has an instinct for compassion and an intense dislike of injustice and hypocrisy, while a lingering fondness for Jean Plaidy suggests that we share a romantic streak, with a possible fondness for cravats. 

However Daily Mirror Style, it seems, is not a home decorating handbook, but instead may have been a catalyst for a career as a writer of some sort… maybe working as a journalist exposing injustice and hypocrisy!

Perhaps such a career has prompted a yearning to escape urban life and its underbelly, because although I suspect my partner is British, she likes reading about other cultures.  So I think she has a taste for travel, with a preference for desolate landscapes thinly populated by people with doomed love lives. But my partner remains an optimist: even when reading a book out of her comfort zone, she is open to the possibility of human beings rising to the challenge when confronted with the end of civilisation.  

My partner is an open-minded reader, interested in people and places unlike her own, but her choices are all from northern latitudes. She seems to like classics, so I’m going to suggest an Australian classic: The Battlers by Kylie Tennant, a journalist who walked the roads with unemployed men during the Depression, and exposed the cruelty and injustice that these men suffered to a wider audience. The Battlers is Australia’s Grapes of Wrath and it’s never been out of print since published in 1941 —it’s a story about men on the road, driven by hope while looking for work, but unlike Steinbeck’s story, The Battlers features a feisty female travelling companion called Darcy.  

Karen on Lisa’s choices: This sounds like someone who reads widely, across genres and countries. They are interested in big ideas and enjoy thoughtful books which raise big questions. The list has some well-known titles but the inclusion of The Yield leads me to think this is a reader whose choice of books isn’t driven by publishing buzz. 

It’s tough to think of something that would suit their tastes but which they are unlikely to have already read. I’m going to recommend The Armies by the Colombian author Evilio Rosero. This was published in 2009 and won the International Foreign Fiction. It’s a short novel about a man caught in the crossfire between state forces, drug traffickers and guerrillas and facing a moral dilemma about his missing wife.