MyLifeinBooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A favourite children’s book is The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren. I think this came out of a combination of movie-watching and reading, as our Sunday morning television used to broadcast lots of Swedish children’s movies. The movies based on the stories by Astrid Lindgren were always favourites and it wasn’t long before my mother pointed out her books to me at the library. What I loved about The Brothers Lionheart was the unconditional love between the brothers, the world-beyond-dead that Astrid Lindgren managed to paint first as picture perfect, before revealing its darker shades, and then leaving a particularly heroic role to the two brothers (who were children, and taken seriously as if they were adults, which is a big plus) in defeating that darkness. Of course, I might not have been able to articulate it as such when I was younger. However, the book had a lasting impression on me. Growing up in an atheist household, I was fascinated with the picture of life after dead. More so because it’s idyllic atmosphere held much of what I would have considered a ideal setting myself: nature, bunnies, a small cottage/farm, and fruit from your own orchard.

Iris: I have been thinking about this for some time, because I am sure I must have read more “grown-up” books before I turned to the one I am writing about here, but I cannot for the life of me remember it. Perhaps because when I consider my reading life during the first years of high school it is dominated by Harry Potter. The book that changed me from a Harry Potter fangirl [which I still am] into one that fell head over heels in love with classics was, rather predictably, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Somehow, the reason why I started reading Pride and Prejudice was again connected to television. I became interested after seeing a glimpse of the 1995 television series on TV, before my father put on another channel because he didn’t want to watch “such drivel”. I remember looking up the name “Mr. Darcy” (the scene I saw was the one where Elizabeth meets Mr Darcy at Pemberly and exclaiming his name) on the internet, and finding out about Pride and Prejudice. I knew I had heard about the book before, I knew it was “a classic”, but I really didn’t have a clue what it was about [I still wonder how that is even possible]. The reason why I searched for it was because I saw what I considered to be a similar dress-style to the Little Women movie, which I really liked.. [oh, for all the silly reasons..]

So, I took Pride and Prejudice out of the school library and read it in two days straight. I stayed up late at night, pretending to be asleep but reading beneath the covers because I had to know what happened next. I hadn’t yet gotten used to reading in English, and I remember being thoroughly confused about the meaning of the word “elopement”, but I loved the love story. I loved the passion and the tension and the grand declarations combined with the restrained etiquette. I very much fell in love with the love story when I was 14. I desperately needed that love story having just lived through a horrible first relationship of my own, with a controlling boyfriend and all that jazz. It was only after Pride and Prejudice, after I had reread it numerous times, after I had desperately searched for another story that would make me feel like this one had, that I started appreciating Austen for everything she offers besides the love story. But because the book made me search for other classics, and because it was the first “grown-up” book I read in English (I had read Harry Potter in English before) I still consider it to be the starting point of my “adult” reading life. However, I cannot do that without giving Harry Potter its due too, for those were the books that truly made me define myself as a reader again, and a proud geek, and that made me turn to English books as I couldn’t wait for the translation to appear.

Iris: In a way I want to repeat the answer to the second question here, for Pride and Prejudice was a defining book for me. But I’ll take “early adulthood” as meaning the years beyond teenage life and force myself to think of another title. Which then turns out to be, predictably, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. This is perhaps not so much a change from Pride and Prejudice and more of a logical follow-up, but for me it came with a different framework.

For one, Jane Eyre allowed me to think about a lot of things. Reading this book was not solely about the love story, but also about its other themes: religion, feminism, “othering”, and coming-of-age. Whereas I only thought about other themes besides the love story later when it came to Pride and Prejudice, the other themes were part of the instant appeal of Jane Eyre.

I think Jane Eyre was a book I only understood later, as an adult. It wasn’t for me when I was 14. I remember reading it back then, liking it, but not as much as I did when I was an “adult”. There were things to it that I couldn’t grasp, or wasn’t ready to admit to myself. One of those things is almost certainly the more sexual overtones of the story. I have never been comfortable with the ideas of desire and sexual tension in books. One of the reasons why I loved Pride and Prejudice was that they were there, but hidden, concealed. Jane Eyre plays upon the same concealment, but it is also vastly more open about passion being a part of human nature. It is more muddy in that way. I am still not overtly open about sexuality, nor about “finding men attractive”, or whatever, but I think Jane Eyre was part of a process that at least let me acknowledge it to myself, and some other online friends.

Jane Eyre also taught me a lot about loving a book that might not be perfect all-round. There are things to be said about Rochester’s behaviour, and about the portrayal of his first wife in a way that recalls colonial discourse, that usually halt me in my tracks. It was the first book that taught me about how feelings of discomfort might join with feelings of all-round-love. I haven’t been able to find a solution to this dilemma yet, except perhaps the acceptance that you can enjoy a story despite recognising its faults.

Iris: One of the books that has turned into a favourite in recent years is Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. And it could only do so because I started blogging, since I believe I would never have found out about Lanagan’s novels if it hadn’t been for other bloggers being so passionate about them.

Tender Morsels challenged me, because I did not read much fantasy pre-blogging. I think I may even have been one of those readers who wasn’t sure if it was correct to admit to liking fantasy before I became part of the online world. Genre reading is such a taboo in “the real world” sometimes. And it isn’t often that the complexity of books that contain fantasy elements is acknowledged. Tender Morsels was my “big revelation” about the true beauty and complexity fantasy novels can have. About the big issues that can be tackled (abuse, rape, self-acceptance) in a balanced manner.

Tender Morsels is the perfect example of how blogging changed my (reading) life: reading outside my comfort zone was challenging, but rewarding, and blogging has motivated me to do this more than ever. Moreover, Tender Morsels was a gift from a blogger, and came recommended by yet another, which I think is what blogging means most of all: friendships created through a mutual conversations about books.

Jackie:When I was about 16 I fell in love with William Horwood‘s Duncton Wood series. Each book was about 750 pages long and I was proud of myself for reading something with so many pages. The books follow a group of moles on a epic adventure, but although it sounds like a children’s book it definitely isn’t – there is enough rape, murder and torture to classify firmly that this is an adult novel. I think this series is a modern classic and am surprised it isn’t more well known. At the time I was living in the Lake District, enjoying an outdoor life involving canoeing, walking and lots of camping. I think this is the reason that this story set in the great outdoors resonated with me so much.

Jackie: I read very little in early adulthood – having to work whilst doing a demanding chemistry degree meant I had very little free time. I got married straight after graduation and my husband and I bought a house together in Newcastle. Once there I started work as an analytical chemist and began reading again, although probably only about 10 books a year. During this time I was almost totally reliant on the Richard and Judy Book Club for my reading suggestions. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger was a favourite – I loved the romance and tragedy of it all.

Jackie: I started blogging shortly after the birth of my second son – I was at home on my own and needed something to occupy my brain. I never expected to still be writing it four years later, but it has become a bit addictive. My knowledge of books has grown immeasurably and I have found a whole world of literature that I was previously unaware of. I now read a range of different books from across the globe and no longer rely on the blurbs of random books in my local library. I have also become more aware of the literary prizes and this led me to read my favourite book, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It is set in India during the 1970s, a turbulent time for the country. It is a bleak, but inspiring tale that explains the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens of the country. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Jackie: My guilty pleasure is cookbooks. I love cooking, especially when combined with chemistry to form molecular gastronomy. I’m normally happy cooking traditional food, but when I have the time I love to experiment with more unusual techniques. The only reason I feel guilty is because they cost so much. My current favourite is Bentley by Brent Savage, which is a stunning book to look at as well as one that contains many fantastic recipes.

Eva: My dad read a bit, but my mom was the big reader of our family.  I was read to every night before bed up until I was maybe 12 or 13.  As I got older, my mom and I would alternate reading the chapters.  Oh, and if I chose to spend my (very small) allowance on books, my mom would match my spending, effectively doubling my book budget (we also went to the library regularly).  So yes, my household definitely encouraged my book-love!

I had all kinds of favourite books when I was a child, but one of the lesser-known ones was The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston.  A little boy in boarding school is sent to spend his holidays with his great aunt in this fabulous old house, Green Knowe.  Once he’s there, his aunt tells him the most marvelous family stories & he soon discovers that the house holds a fair amount of magic.  She wrote several books about Green Knowe, but that first one has my heart; I still have my copy and reread it just a few years ago.  More famous titles I loved include The Giver, Anne of Green Gables, the Nancy Drew series, and the Chronicles of Narnia.

Simon S: Without a doubt it would have to be Sherlock Holmes.  As an early teen I would be dragged, or maybe I should say taken away, on long walking holidays involving 10 miles a day treks through the Peaks or the Lake District. My great uncle Derrick gathered that mid morning and mid afternoon I would tire and so would have memorised, almost word for word, at least ten Sherlock short stories each ‘holiday’ and tell me two of them during those lulls. Interestingly these stories, along with others of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, are books that encouraged me to read again after a wilderness of reading in my late teens and early twenties. I still turn to them now when I have a reading funk too.

Eva: Hmmm…I read a lot of classics when I was younger that weren’t necessarily children’s books; I remember reading White Fang when I was 9, for instance. When I was 11, my mom and I read Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera together. We had just moved back to England, and I remember us laying on my bed with my new pink bedspread reading it together.  For my 12th birthday, my mom took me to see the musical in London: it was magical!

Simon S: It would have to be Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier because it was the book that made me want to go  and read anything and everything again and reminded me of the power of a great story told by a brilliant storyteller.  I picked it up because it had a ridiculous cover and looked a bit ‘spooky’, I was in no way prepared for the wonderful journey, which I know sounds a cliché but its true, which I went on for 400 pages which just seemed to rush by.  I loved the gothic elements and mystery, but mainly it was the prose. It set me off reading again after several years of not, I can’t think of a better direction a book could give.

Eva: Honestly, as much as I love reading and feel that I would be a very different person without books, I can’t really point to a specific title that changed my life.  That being said, I remember discovering Salman Rushdie when I was 17 (I started with The Satanic Verses) and being blown away by the magical realist style & international setting.  It definitely opened my eyes to how incredible fiction outside of the white US/UK bubble could be.  Don’t get
me wrong, I still read and adore lots of white authors, British,
American, and otherwise!

Simon S: I wanted to say Gillespie and I because it’s a modern neo-Victorian masterpiece which plays with your head and leaves you shocked, but that doesn’t have a link to blogging as I would have read that from loving Jane Harris’ debut novel.  Instead I am going to chose The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I wouldn’t have heard of Persephone Books, and indeed this overlooked sensation novel, if it hadn’t been for several bloggers like you, Claire, Verity or Rachel.  I am so glad I did because it introduced me to a wonderful story that was long forgotten… and then onto others.

Eva: The book blogosphere has definitely changed my reading habits; I now read far more women than men, which wasn’t always the case.  I used to participate in all kinds of reading challenges set up by book bloggers, which introduced me to a ton of different genres and geographic areas and more that I’d never thought about before (can you believe I didn’t even know of the books-about-books nonfiction topic before bloggers started mentioning various titles?).  In fact, one such challenge inspired me to take a hard look at how whitewashed my reading was and to begin searching out more authors of colour.  And of course, there are so many authors and books that I hadn’t heard of pre-book blogging that are now firm favourites.  My book horizons have been broadened immeasurably, at the same time that my previously-existing loves (i.e.: classics, mysteries, fantasy, international fiction) have been reinforced.

I’ve been blogging for over five years, so forcing me to choose a favourite seems cruel! But I’m going to focus on the ‘one of’ part of the phrase and go with Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s her debut novel and centers around a young Nigerian girl who has an abusive father. Adichie is an incredible storyteller, and this book has stuck with me over the years since I’ve read it. In fact, just writing about it is making me want to reread it!  Fortunately, I have a copy on my shelves due to the kindness of a book blogger who sent me her ‘spare.’ :)

Simon S: I don’t believe in books being guilty pleasures, just pleasures.  So… One that will surprise people… Hmmmm!  I guess M.C Beaton and Tess Gerritsen have surprised people so they are out.  Oh, I have a secret passion for Batman graphic novels, it’s my only remaining geek out since childhood.  I wanted to be Bruce Wayne for years or one of the villains on occasional and I do like turning to these now and again, does that suffice?  I don’t think many people would know that, I keep it under wraps like a secret identity.

Eva: Let’s see…my newfound love for the Hamish Macbeth series is a bit lighter than my normal fare.  Oh, and I adore Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely!  I can’t say I really have any guilty pleasures though; in fact, I’m far more likely to feel guilty when I don’t care for a book that everyone else in the blogosphere loves. :)

Polly: I did indeed grow up in a book-loving household.  Many a weekend was spent in the lovely old Waterstones in Newcastle with it’s ‘W’ monogrammed stained-glass windows, leafing through the childrens books there in the basement.  I’m sad to say that it’s now moved and been replaced by an H&M!  It’s hard to pick a favourite childhood book. My thought immediately turn to classics such as Winnie The Pooh and The Chronicles of Narnia and of course I loved fairy tales.  I had a copy of Terry Jones’ Fairy Tales which was much loved and the stories repeatedly re-read.  I loved it for it’s fabulous illustrations as much as the original and charming stories – full of magic and with a moral.  I was always able to persuade my Mum to read ‘just one more story’ at bed time by choosing one of the tales ‘The Three Raindrops’ which was always a good bet because it was just a paragraph long.

Gav: My dad definitely isn’t a reader, he doesn’t like reading instruction manuals.  My mum though definitely is.  I didn’t really grow up in a house of books.  Though my mum used to but me the odd book.  I recall a copy of Wind in the Willows that stayed in a drawer in the living room for years and years. And I never could get on with it.

I think if I had to choose one book from childhood it would have to be The Twits by Roald Dahl though really it could be any Dahl novel from Matilda, The Witches, BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I think The Twits is probably the least fanciful but most grotesque of his novels especially the part of about food in beards.  But Dahl in general is an amazing children’s writer.  He just gets what childhood is and how adults seem to children.  Plus he gets how easy it is a child’s imagination can run wild.  Oh I forgot the illustrations by Quentin Blake! Absolutely perfect.

Polly: Hmmm… struggling to remember now!  When I was about 10 and 11 I read alot of cross-over books that had an older edge but still had an element of magic (Watership Down, The Hobbit).  I think the first really ‘grown-up’ books that I read were around the time that I was in school.  I remember reading Animal Farm and not quite getting all of the references but enjoying it.  I got really involved in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies which I thought was superb at the time – I studied it for my GCSEs.  I think as a result of this, for a long time I was mainly interested in ‘modern classics’ and particularly those with a darker edge.  It’s not until recent years that I’ve started to explore books set pre-1900.

Gav: Now that’s really grey I didn’t get bookie until I was 16 and I delved into science fiction and fantasy mostly, which to most people isn’t really grown-up reading.  And I really can’t recall what I was really reading.  I can see snapshots.  But if we’re looking for challenging language, you could say it was Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.  I’d read The Hobbit but that is definitely more a child’s book as it’s simpler in lots of ways. But Lord of the Rings stretching over a trilogy

I’ll let you into a confession though: I’ve never read the very ending of the book. 

Polly: As mentioned above, the experience of really studying modern classics such as Orwell and Golding and then Muriel Spark influenced me in the sense that I tended to look out for modern classics. Additionally a local secondhand bookshop near my Sixth Form College which sold Penguin Classics for a pound each led to me becoming a little obsessed with those lovely orange covers.

Gav: Ha well that’s got to be Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett.  I’ve already said that I didn’t read a lot.  I tried to read but found it hard to find an author that really connected with me.  Well this book started a passion for reading that’s lasted the last 17 years.  It helped I think that he had a lot of books out so I could read them all to satisfy some internal hunger.  That I’ve just kept feeding 

Polly: I’ve read alot more classic novels since blogging and reading recommendations – for example I fell in love with Wilkie Collins and really enjoyed reading Persephone Classics such as The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I think it’s broadened my reading horizons by making me braver about reading more widely or books that I thought would be boring before!

Gav: One??  You’re kidding right!  But if you insist it’s going to be The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridsaon.  It was the first book of cold crime I’d read and it took me in to the whole area of cold crime and then crime in translation in general. And that’s one of the thing that I love about blogging is that there are bloggers who stick to one niche.  They do it very well but they never seem to grow or change as readers.  And I do like to see my pushing the edges of my reading flipping from one literary obsession to the other.  And The Draining Lake was a great doorway for me.

Polly: I’m pretty open about the books I read so there may not be any surprises!  My favourite page-turners are usually by crime authors such as Sophie Hannah, Val McDermid and Tess Gerritsen but I think these are excellent so I don’t feel any measure of guilt about reading them.  I also LOVE Daphne du Maurier who has been written off as trashy romance by certain foolish (in my humble opinion!) people in the past.  She’s definitely one of my favourite authors and her novels are wonderfully atmospheric and beautifully described.

Gav: I’m pretty honest about my reading.  I don’t really think of anything as a guilty pleasure as I don’t see anything to feel guilty about.  I guess that I love Bridget Jones’ Diary might cause a moment for pause…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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