MyLifeinBooks

Day Two – we’re barely getting started!  Plenty more to come this week, including at least one more blogger who correctly identified their mystery partner…

Colin and I first met sometime before we were born… yes, he is my twin brother.  Younger twin brother.  He is also a blogger, although books are not the main focus of his blog (which long predates mine, having been going since 2003!) Colin’s Only Diary.  You’re more likely to hear about football, politics, or sitcoms – but books get an occasional look-in.  Get ready to see how different twins can be…

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

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

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

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

Claire: Growing up, I was remarkably unaware of the distinction between children’s and adult’s books.  At home, I could try anything and there really didn’t seem that much of a difference between children’s authors Hans Christian Anderson and Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘grown-up’ authors Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier (all grouped together at one point in our distinctly unorganized bookshelves).  They were annoyingly shelved in different sections of the public library but, as far as I was concerned, a book was a book.  If it sounded interesting, I wanted to read it.  What did my age have to do with it?  Sadly, the librarians disagreed and continually denied me access to what I wanted most.  When I was ten, there was a battle to check out volume one of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery.  By that point, I had read all of her novels and short stories, had visited Prince Edward Island, and was completely obsessed with Montgomery.  I wanted to know everything about her and the juvenile biographies were not cutting it.  I needed the journals.  I forced some adult family member (most likely my grandmother) to convince the librarians to let me take out it for ‘work on a school project’ (a blatant lie) and rushed home with my prize.  And then I started reading.  This was even better than her novels!  This was Montgomery herself!  She was vivid and conflicted, always interesting even though I didn’t have much sympathy for some of her dramatics.  Getting to read her thoughts, to see her speak for and about herself, was an amazing revelation.  I discovered a passion for diaries and, perhaps more importantly, learned that an author could be completely fascinating without being someone I would necessarily like if we met in real life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire: I think some people would probably be surprised by my love of survival fiction.  Fiction is the key part of that.  I want a slight element of fantasy and distance, even though the real pleasure comes from imagining what you would do in the same circumstances.  My father was the one who initially put me on to these books, beginning with the excellent My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, one of his childhood favourites. The only book that has ever come close to challenging my affection for it is Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, though, as an adult, I also adore survival-focused post-apocalyptic science fiction novels (like Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle).  Details are important in these books and survival fiction writers seem to  be almost as obsessed with them as I am, with the best books reading less like novels than ‘How To’ guides.  Half the fun of My Side of the Mountain comes from trying to make the traps described in the book. 

Colin: My student days are behind me now, but at the time I found Trev & Simon’s Stupid Book absolutely hilarious (and I’m not sure I wouldn’t still find it funny now…), but since it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a novel, it probably doesn’t count. If we are still supposed to be guilty about Harry Potter it would have to be that, or my Cliff Richard autobiography.

Welcome, welcome, to a second series of My Life in Books on Stuck-in-a-Book, shamelessly ripped off from the TV series.  This time around there are even more bloggers involved: sixteen lovely folk all said yes!  I’ve grouped them into pairs, but without revealing to them who their mystery partner is – which makes it all the more fun when they guess what the books say about the chooser!  

I’m really excited about the wonderful people involved, and I hope you’ll enjoy the week.  Do comment, and fingers crossed the bloggers in question will be along to reply.  Here goes!

Rachel, also known as Book Snob, writes one of the loveliest and most popular book blogs around, and describes herself as a “book loving, tea drinking, quilt making, cake eating, itchy feet possessing Londoner.”

Teresa, along with Jenny (who’ll appear later in the week!) is one half of the blogging duo behind Shelf Love, a pun which it took me about two years to get.  She’s also the first blogger I met from outside the UK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teresa, on Rachel’s choices: This reader clearly loves reading about the past, with a strong preference toward the British Isles, so I’m guessing she (or he! although I’d guess she if I had to) is either British or a confirmed Anglophile. Her love of The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, and Rosamund Pilcher tell me that she’s something of a romantic, but one with her feet on the ground. She does, after all, choose Jane Eyre over Wuthering Heights, and she mentions Testament of Youth, which is grounded in the difficult realities of life. Because almost all the books she mentions are from the early 20th century or earlier, I couldn’t hazard a guess about her age. I will say that whatever her age, she probably has old-fashioned sensibilities, not in a stodgy, stick-in-the-mud way, but in a way that appreciates and embraces what we can learn from the past. She’s also read all the books I’ve been meaning to read but can’t seem to get around to! (All those books have been on my list for ages, but Jane Eyre is the only one I’ve actually read.)

Rachel, on Teresa’s choices: The choice of books is interesting and eclectic but has an overriding theme of journeying – the person seems to have a real interest in reading about personal journeys and how people have overcome challenges to get to where they are. The inclusion of a book about spirituality is a pointer to a Christian faith and I suspect that having the Little House books as a childhood favourite means the person grew up in America.  Overall I would say this person is ambitious, adventurous and has a constant desire to grow and develop as a person, and looks to the lives of others who have battled hard to reach their goals or overcome difficult personal circumstances for inspiration and encouragement. [Simon: I should add, Rachel correctly guessed Teresa, but didn’t want to say in case she turned out to be wrong!]

Well, folks, we’ve reached the end of the Week of Lives – just two more readers to share their choices. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers who participated this week (and the two people who turned down the opportunity very politely!) I didn’t expect – although perhaps I should have done – such a brilliant range of titles, and lovely personal anecdotes too. Thank you so, so much! But it’s not over yet – let’s hear from our final two readers… and don’t forget to let me know if you’ve done My Life in Books on your own blogs.

Harriet lives in Oxford, and blogs at the efficiently-named Harriet Devine’s Blog. She is the author of several books, including a wonderful memoir Being George Devine’s Daughter.

Nancy lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is a lovely reader of blogs. She also often sends me pictures and videos of cats, which are always welcome!

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.
Harriet: Yes, I did grow up in a book loving household, and, though she taught me to read before I was five, my mother loved to read to me and I loved to be read to. Many of the books we read were ones she had as a child – The Secret Garden, all of E. Nesbit – but when I was very tiny my favorites were the beautiful little books of Beatrix Potter. I could have picked almost any one of these but I was particularly fond of The Tale of Tom Kitten. It’s such a perfect story – Mrs Tabitha Twitchett dressing up her three children in “elegant, uncomfortable clothes” and giving them strict instructions to stay clean and out of trouble, which of course they absolutely do not. The illustrations are so perfect, too – Tom with his buttons bursting off, the ducks waddling off wearing the kittens’ clothes. I must have read this hundreds of times, to myself and to generations of children, but it still makes me smile with total delight.
Nancy: Hmmmm, that’s hard to answer. We lived out in a small community, 20 miles from a town of any size (where I went to high school and college) and I don’t remember going to any bookstores there. Though the reading textbooks were not supposed to leave the classroom – they sat on a shelf except when in use – I always managed to sneak them into my satchel and take them home. We were not supposed to be reading ahead, and take up each story as a class – but I could never wait. Once I got to high school there was a great library. I read before and after school (waiting on my ride), at lunch, in study hall, even in class, and into the night. Many times, I read a book a day.
Back to my childhood in the 1940s: I remember my parents reading a lot of magazines, the sort with stories – my mother kept a subscription to Redbook for many years, especially for the story. I cannot call up a mental image of being read to but I must have been, since I would have been since I would have been unable to read them myself. The only books I remember owning are the Little Golden Books – The Shy Little Kitten, The Poky Puppy, Tootle, and The Saggy Baggy Elephant – which are for sale again, so I have bought new copies of them. There were also the Little Big Books (I think they were called, or perhaps Big Little Books), chunky, blocky shaped – I had Little Orphan Annie and my brother had Dick Tracy in that format. There were a couple of other books that I can’t call up right now. Here’s the sad part, I did not know about books by Beatrix Potter or A.A. Milne or Kenneth Grahame until I was an adult!

Qu. 2) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed?
Harriet: Believe it or not, this was William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and I read it when I was about ten years old. Both my parents were in the theatre – my mother a designer, my father an actor and director – so I was used to seeing a lot of plays, sometimes several times if I got dumped at the back of the stalls during rehearsals. Around this time they both started working at Stratford on Avon, where my father directed a production of this play. For some reason I became fascinated by it, and got hold of the big red hardback Arden edition he’d been using to work on it. I was immediately hooked, not just by reading Shakespeare’s words but also by the fact that there were notes at the bottom of each page, explaining difficult words, offering alternative readings, providing background references. My first introduction to literary scholarship and obviously, in the end, hugely influential.
Nancy: When I was in about grades 7 or 8 through 9, I made my uncle who lived with us join a book club so I could pick out the books and of those, I remember two – Not as A Stranger by Morton Thompson (was made into a movie) and another one about an alcoholic newspaper editor (also made into a movie). I was quite taken with the one about the editor, and thought I might like to be an editor one day. This uncle wasn’t much older than my brother and I, he had a medical discharge from the Navy (rheumatoid arthritis) and was in a wheelchair, not able to go out on his own. With not much he could do, he read a lot of magazines, would regularly order all the current “men’s magazines” from the local cafe. I read those too – you know (or most probably don’t) the “I was held captive by a tribe of Amazon women” sort – or war stories. Yup. That made up a good bit of my reading material until I was in high school.

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.

Harriet: I didn’t go to university until I was in my thirties, which in some ways was probably quite a good thing, as I think I was a lot more dedicated and hard-working than I’d have been at the “right” age. When I was a postgraduate student, I was asked to give some lectures as part of a new course on women’s writing, and one of them was to be on Jane Austen. I’d probably read all Austen’s novels by then but I re-read them with a new angle in mind – could Austen be called a feminist writer? In my lecture I discussed all the novels, but the one I focussed my main argument on was Mansfield Park.
Many people will say this is their least favourite, and many people will say they dislike Fanny Price for her weakness, her fainting fits, her strict morality. But my argument – and I still stand by it – is that this is precisely the point. Fanny is marginalised in every possible way. A poor relation, she is treated almost with contempt by most of the family who have taken her in, but my goodness does she have the strength to stand by her beliefs and principles, even when she’s being abused for doing so. You see this most clearly when she astonishes and upsets them all by refusing to marry Henry Crawford, but it’s evident throughout, and by the end she proves to be the only member of the household to have got it all right, and everyone finally recognises it. So that was my argument for Austen’s feminism – women may be outwardly powerless and severely put-upon, but they have incredible inner strength and that’s what really matters when the chips are down. I expect I put it rather better than that at the time. But in any case all this did set me off in a certain direction, as what I suppose you could call that of a feminist literary historian.
Nancy: One book that stands out in my mind when I was 21 (summer of 1962, just out of college) was Hawaii by James Michener. I got it from the bookmobile – and with nothing else to do, read it during all the waking hours of two or three days. Now, that’s a big book. Then, in 1974 (age 33), I read another book by Michener, The Source – and liked it so much I thought I’d be reading other books by him but I never did. I loved how that book was laid out, alternating chapters following story lines from different ages in time for the same locale. I don’t know that either of those books set me off in any particular direction in life but they are the two that I remember the most, that made the most impact.

Qu. 4) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last five years, and how has blogging or the reading of blogs changed your reading habits?
Harriet: This is a really hard question because, to answer the second part of the question first, blogging has caused me to read so many more books and I’ve really loved a number of them. But one particular strand of that reading that’s really blossomed is my developing interest in books by women writers of the early to mid twentieth century. And here I must speak up for Emily Hilda (or EH) Young, a writer who has been astonishingly overlooked in recent years and is well overdue a revival. The first one of hers that I read, for my reading group, was Miss Mole (1930), and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Hannah Mole is very much subject to the times in which she lived. Intelligent, witty, perceptive, she is also poor and disadvantaged. Her only means of support is the jobs she has to take as a companion to generally unpleasant old women, from which she frequently gets sacked for insubordination. Her sharp, often cynical, sense of humour has always got her through, but at nearly forty she is keenly aware of the grim future that potentially awaits her when she is too old to get another place. But when she takes a job in a family, she transforms not only their lives but her own into the bargain. Young writes with wit, intelligence, and astonishing perceptiveness about people, their peculiarities and their interactions. Wonderful stuff.
Nancy: The Espionage! Books by Alan Furst – his last ten, published between 1983-2010. As for book blogs, I love reading about the books that everyone else is reading – and have read a number of ones featured (your blog, Cornflower, and dovegreyreader), but not a lot. I seldom, if ever, read new books (other than Furst’s), especially not the “best sellers” – prefer books from the same time period as you. My reading habits – other than espionage (about the only fiction I read) – fall mostly into books by authors about themselves, such as letters, diaries, autobiographies – have always been interested in the lives of authors and how they work (especially E.F. Benson and Virginia Woolf). And then, of course, I love the Mapp and Lucia books and the Provincial Lady books.

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!
Harriet: I don’t think anyone who knows me, or reads my blog, will be in the least surprised to hear that my guilty pleasures always take the form of crime novels. Whether I’m on the plane, or on the beach, or down in the dumps, or not very well, or just in need of some light relief, out come the detectives. Sometimes it’s the classics – Allingham, Marsh, even Christie – but here I’m speaking up for Steig Larsson and his astonishing Millennium trilogy. I got hold of an audio book of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last summer and was absolutely rivetted. Yes, there’s violence, and yes, many upsetting things happen, and I know people who have hated these books because of it. But, for me, the combination of complex, interwoven plots, fascinating political and social skullduggery, and complicated, intelligent characters was an absolute winner. Above all I was entirely enthralled by the Girl herself, Lisbeth Salander – brilliant, difficult, damaged, with her own strict, though highly unconventional, morality. I loved every minute of all three of these and, if by chance anyone hasn’t read them, I’d say – don’t listen to the skeptics and the cynics – give them a go!
Nancy: I don’t know if this qualifies as a guilty pleasure since it isn’t actual reading, but what (in the last couple of years now) has kept me from reading as much as I used to: I am firmly Addicted to Sudoku. When I am not up and out and about – or at the computer – I have a book of Sudoku puzzles in my hands. I end the day (wee hours) with it and begin my day with it (lie abed way too much). And, when I say “addiction,” it is just that – cannot be without it, take it with me if I will have to wait anywhere or if I am away overnight – just as I used to take a book along. This is what retirement was done to me! Other than Sudoku, my interest is solidly in books, bookstores, libraries, and online – and my two grandsons (19 years and 9 months), of course.

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

Nancy, about Harriet’s choices: I love that the co-participant lists Tom Kitten and I wish I could have met Beatrix Potter’s characters in my childhood. I was never introduced to Shakespeare anywhere along the line, so have no idea here. Mansfield Park and Miss Mole lead me to believe the co-participant is much, much younger than I. The Larson book: not put off by the violence there, but unsure whether others would approve(??) I loved all three movies, by the way. This was very difficult!

Harriet, about Nancy’s choices: This is obviously someone with a great interest in history, which is a feature of both the travel book and the spy series. In fact even though Woolf and Benson are mentioned, it’s for their letters and biographies rather than their novels. Since Not as a Stranger is a medical drama, I wondered if this person might have become a doctor? In any case it’s a person with a strong factual bias and a liking for problem solving (spies/sudoko). I’m going to really stick my neck out here and say I suspect this list belongs to a man! [Simon: oops, maybe you shouldn’t have stuck your neck out!]

Happy weekend one and all, no miscellany or Sunday song this weekend – because we still have four wonderful people who are going to share their lives in books! Over to them (and they are the week’s chattiest people! Sadly they were both so enthusiastic that I’ve had to cut a fair bit from both of them, simply so you’re not reading through to next week – but it was painful to cut anything from such wonderful bibliophiles!)

Elaine lives in Colchester, the UK’s oldest recorded town. She blogs at Random Jottings and has been made the subject of her very own expression – in some circles, ‘doing an Elaine’ is slang for voraciously reading all the works of a newly-discovered author one after another.

David lives in Crosby, Liverpool. He is a loyal blog-reader, and tweets @David73277. He’s also, I discovered, not over forty… but let’s let him choose his books anyway…

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.

Elaine: I was not aware of many books in my household as a child and also cannot remember either of my parents reading to me. Though my father was a very clever man he was a mathematician and rarely read any fiction and when he did it was Thomas Hardy, hardly attractive to a child! [Simon: what similar fathers we have!] My mother did not come to reading until later in life.

I don’t know where my love of books came from, but I cannot remember a time when I have not loved reading. My sister, Judith who is five years older than me, read but not hugely and I have a vague recollection of the odd occasion when she read aloud to me. So any reading I did came from my wanting to do so and nowhere else. Favourite books from my childhood are numerous and many and though the literati always despised her, Enid Blyton was one of my favourite childhood authors. I loved her Adventure books best of all though the Famous Five were also favourites. The gift Enid Blyton had in abundance was that she made reading fun, easy and enjoyable so that the junior reader gets in the habit of reading which I think is essential. I think the one childhood book which really stands out is A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. There was an old copy in our house, heaven knows where it came from as nobody laid claim to it, and I discovered it one day and read it through in a sitting and wept and wept and wept through the entire reading. I remember so well Sara Crewe alone in her attic with her doll Emily and longing for her dead father and even now when I read it, as I do as an adult, it brings tears to my eyes. Of course, I now read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s adult books and they are wonderful too.

David: Mine was not an overly bookish household, though I do remember being read to by my parents and, slightly later, being signed up as a library member. For some reason, my clearest memories of being read to seem to involve the Mr Men series by Roger Hargreaves. [Simon: Hurrah!] This may be influenced by having had on my bedroom wall a long poster containing the full cast of characters. At the time I probably identified most strongly with Mr Fussy for all sorts of reasons, not least his obsessive tidiness. It appears that the Mr Men are back on television now, where Mr Fussy appears to have been renamed Mr Pernickety. This seems like quite a long and difficult name for the target audience; or am I being pernickety? In book form, I am pleased to report, he is still Mr Fussy. [Simon: don’t get me started on the TV series…]

I was more of a bookish child in the metaphorical rather than the literal sense. I always enjoyed the academic side of school, but with hindsight it seems odd that I loved writing, both in the sense of composition and of putting words on the page, without displaying particular enthusiasm for reading fiction. I followed the news and politics from quite an early age, but my love of fiction came along much later. That’s not all that’s changed: I now find writing long hand very hard work and, on the rare occasions I do, it is even harder for anyone to actually read it!

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

Elaine: Jane Eyre was the first ‘grown up’ book I read and as I was only eleven at the time, all that was going on in my life was school and homework. I found a new copy on the shelves – it was a small World’s Classic with a red cover and it just felt good in my hands – small and just the right size to slip into a bag. I was very proud of taking such a grown up book out of the library and was even more determined to read it when the librarian, Mrs Collins, asked if I was sure I wanted to read it. Well, read it I did and I found it hard going and skipped a lot of it, but I remember enjoying the first section all about Jane’s childhood and being sent away to school by wicked Mrs Reed and her friendship with Helen Burns. The rest of the book passed me by, as it would at my age, but I re-read it when I was about fourteen and then it gripped me totally and Jane’s cry of equality with Mr Rochester made my hair stand on end and still does now after endless readings. It was a life shaping book for me and started me off on my love of Victorian literature.

David: I didn’t become seriously interested in literature until studying for GCSE and then A level. There was a particular lady with connections to Bath whose books were among the first to really work their magic upon me, but I am not going to talk about one of those. It is certainly true that I came to nineteenth century classics long before developing any interest in anything more recent. I first read Anthony Trollope either in the summer after completing my A levels or the summer I finished my degree, I cannot actually remember which. The particular work of his that I would like to highlight is Barchester Towers.

This is the second installment of his five book series set in the fictional southern English county of Barsetshire and its cathedral city of Barchester. It brilliantly satirises the internal politics of the Victorian Church of England, but the reader does not need any prior knowledge of, or indeed interest in, the struggles between the High, Broad and Low Church factions, in order to derive a great deal of pleasure from the scheming of characters like the reforming cleric Mr Slope or the domineering Mrs Proudie. The latter has her husband, the new Bishop of Barchester, well and truly under the thumb. A junior member of the clergy, not strong-enough to resist becoming a pawn in the factional jostelling within the diocese, goes by the fitting name of Mr Quiverful. He is presented with the opportunity of preferment to a wardenship post, a position he very much needs since he has no fewer than fourteen children to support. The extent to which it is ethical to pursue promotion within the church for worldly ends is one of the more serious themes with which this witty novel engages. A reader wishing to ponder this surprisingly topical issue could turn to an economist like Will Hutton but – no disrespect Will – he or she could have much more fun by stepping into Trollope’s Barsetshire.

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.

Elaine: At this time I read a lot of books I had missed out on as a child. I still love reading children’s books and it was about this time I read, and I am ashamed to admit I only discovered it in my 20s, Wind in the Willows, the subtleties of which would have passed me by as a child. The friendship between Ratty and Mole and the discovery that life is exciting and rich and full of promise, the bombastic antics of Mr Toad (and don’t we all know a Toad in our lives), the wisdom and grumpiness of Badger and the glorious fight at the end when the Wild Wooders are thrown out of Toad Hall. I simply loved it.

A book which did influence me in one particular direction was A Town Like Alice. My sister was going through a Nevil Shute phase at the time and I picked it up one day, read it and though I don’t think it was the greatest literature in the world, loved the story and, particularly, the second half set in Australia. It instilled in me a wish to visit this country which I have now done, and as you know have just returned again, so I have to say thank you to Nevil for that.

David: Roy Jenkins biography of Victorian British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, was published in 1995, when I was 21. It exemplifies a number of my interests and concerns both in reading and in life: politics, religion, biography, the nineteenth century and, significantly, quality history written for a general audience rather than solely by academics for other academics. I had at this time just completed my History degree. It had been fulfilling and enjoyable, but I had never fully subscribed to the view – popular in academic circles at the time – that historians should position themselves as social scientists, by producing dense publications, heavy on statistics and light on narrative. Gladstone had featured strongly in my studies, so I was already familiar with his life. It was, nevertheless, a pleasure to sit back and enjoy it being told with panache by a someone who had no qualms about being a historian of the old-fashioned story telling school.

Reading this book did not exactly set me off on a certain direction in life – I’m at the latter end of my 30s now and still lacking a sense of direction, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Gladstone’s religious convictions led him to believe he must devote his life to the service of his fellow men. Initially, he considered taking holy orders, but he later came to believe that he might do more good as a politician – don’t laugh, it was more plausible then than it may now appear! Both politics and religion are now regarded with deep suspicion by many, and I suspect that even some believers might be uncomfortable with the extent to which these two fields overlapped in the nineteenth century: the past, as the saying goes, is a different country.

Gladstone is now perhaps best known for the travel bag which took his name; for his “rescue” work with members of the oldest profession; and for addressing Queen Victoria, in her words, ‘as though one were a public meeting’ – she much preferred the exotic and charming Disraeli. However, what may be of much more interest to Stuck in a Book readers is the fact that Gladstone was a voracious reader. Jenkins tells us, for example, that when recovering from poor health in early August he 1869 his subject was reading Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Romala.

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

Elaine: I freely admit to being set in my ways when it comes to reading but one thing blogging has done has made me venture forth into different genres. Not sure that this has been entirely successful but at least I have tried and with the number of books sent to me by publishers I do feel it behoves me to at least try to read them. They are a varied mixture and out of them have come some gems and a few such come to mind. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer is one of the books read in the last five years that I absolutely adored from start to finish. An epistolary novel set in the occupied Channel Islands during the Second World War it is witty, wise and heartbreaking.

Resistance by Agnes Humbert is another such gem. True story and diary kept by a member of the French Resistance and tells of her incarceration in a camp throughout the war and the suffering and pain she endured. Her spirit and bravery, as well as her humour, shine through in this stunning book and makes one wonder how we would react if placed in such a situation.

The answer to this particular question could go on for pages and I am trying hard to restrict myself, but I simply have to mention the discovery, somewhat belated, of the Mapp and Lucia books of E F Benson some three years ago which reduced me to tears aging, this time with helpless laughter. HOW had I managed to not read these all these years? HOW? Quite quite wonderful, already re-read three times and has led me to reading others by this author who was, thankfully, incredibly prolific. I am going to stop right here but cannot leave without mentioning Persesphone Books of which I have read some 50+. This publishing house was just made for me as it is clear from the books I have listed above, that my real reading love is for books written in and around the two world wars. I have tried more modern literature, I have tried reading some of the yearly Booker List, but I am a lost soul and freely admit to being a bit of a Stick in the Mud.

David: This is probably the hardest choice to make, not least because reading blogs has introduced me to so many fantastic novels in recent years. Having said that, I’m going to chose a book I don’t recall having seen mentioned on a blog, since this seems an ideal opportunity to draw attention to a hidden gem. The book in question is A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith who teaches creative writing at Southampton University. It was published in 2006 but I found it in the library in 2008.

Such is the beauty of libraries: they give us the opportunity to a take a chance on books that we might otherwise never come across. We all know that hundreds of libraries are currently under threat in the UK. Much of the campaigning talk in support of libraries has understandably, and rightly, focused on their importance for the less well-off in society, however, I think we should also champion them as resources and centres for the whole community, including those who are lucky enough to have lots of their own books at home. The more of us who use libraries the more likely they are to survive. We should not feel guilty about using them to sample books. If we later go on to buy some of them, then that is money going to retailers, publishers and authors, so even the most uncompromising believers in the primacy of the market should like the sound of that.

Anyway, I really ought to get off my soapbox and tell you what I liked so much about A Bit of Earth. Actually, reference to the battle to save libraries is relevant, because at the centre of this novel is a fight to save a community facility, in this case to prevent some botanic gardens from being built on. The story is about an academic with a young son whose wife is killed in an accident, and how the gardens and the people around them help this shattered family to heal. Commenting on the book on Librarything I wrote: “The idea of the healing power of involvement with nature may not be particularly original, but there is a gentle and wholesome quality to this novel that is quite rare these days.” Other reviewers there described it as charming, warm and good-hearted: all qualities that I love to find in a book. I also felt it was important to feature a book by a female author because despite the fact that my other selections have been written by men, female writers do account for a lot of my reading, certainly as regards fiction.

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Elaine: Mills & Boon. I have recently come out of the closet on my love of these incredibly, wildly, over the top romantic novels. I simply adore them. Man meets woman, they fall in love, something causes a separation and heartbreak, but eventually all misunderstandings are cast aside and all ends happily. I have just finished one today when two lovers, after quarrelling ten years earlier, finally meet up again and marry (her illegitimate child is his son though he does not know it), he goes off to explore the Brazilian jungle (as you do), his plane crashes in the forest and he is pronounced dead. She is pregnant and has another baby and then lo and behold he appears on her doorstep on Christmas Eve having survived in the jungle for months, totally unaware he is a father again and all ends happily. MAGNIFICENT! And yes, we all joke about them and some of them indeed are hilariously awful, but you just try and write one and then write another and keep churning them out every two months.

I used to call this a guilty pleasure but no more. To lie in a soapy bubbly bath, scented candle lit, cup of tea to hand, and wallow and read a Mills & Boon and not leave until it is read and arise out of the bath, not alas like Venus arising from the waves, but more like a pink prune with wrinkled fingers, wrap oneself in a warm dressing gown and then go to bed is one of life’s pleasures which I intend to continue to enjoy.

David: I think the term “guilty pleasure” should be quietly retired, since it suggests we should feel bad about enjoying something that does not find favour with either the arbiters of literary merit or the self-proclaimed guardians of what is “cool”. I am not in the least bit guilty about proclaiming Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series of books as one of my most pleasurable reading experiences. Of course, to get the best out of them you really need to read them in published order from the start, but it is the fourth volume in the series, The World According to Bertie, that I would like to trumpet – although a saxophone would be a more appropriate musical allusion, given that it is the sax which the eponymous heroe, Bertie Pollock, now aged six, was forced to start learning to play, at the age of three or four, by his scarily pushy and opinionated mother, Irene.

Bertie and his mum are, I imagine, the principal stars of this series for most of its fans, but they are just two of a wide cast of characters that includes a portrait artist and his dog named Cyril, an anthropologist, a Glaswegian gangster and, in this particular volume, one of the current descendants of the Jacobite claimants to the thrones of Scotland and England.

Words like gentle and charming, spring to mind once again when describing these books. I also find them very amusing, though I know humour is highly subjective.
I particularly like this fourth book because it is the features the blossoming romance between art dealer Matthew and the delightfully named primary school teacher Elspeth Harmony. Commenting on this series on Lyn’s I Prefer Reading blog, I wrote: “I’m an Elspeth fan too but I’d best not say too much about that since it might not be an entirely healthy thing for a grown up to admit to becoming besotted with a fictional character!”

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

David, about Elaine’s choices: I think that the person who chose this books is a romantic at heart who had a happy childhood and remains in touch with her inner child, continuing to enjoy Wind in the Willows. Based on the inclusion of both Jane Eyre and Mills & Boon, I would stick my neck out and suggest she is a member of the National Trust who likes to visit stately homes, where she dreams of being swept off her feet by the ruggedly handsome lord of the manor. Reading blogs has given her a taste for gentle fiction, either set or written in the first half of the twentieth century.

Elaine, about David’s choices: As I love the Mr. Men and read them to my children, I would think anybody who loves these has a sense of humour and is not ashamed to admit that he/she has a soft spot for books of their childhood. As a lover of Anthony Trollope all I can say is that anybody who likes this book has a fine mind and is a kindred spirit! I find Victorian history fascinating and remember Gladstone well. An interest in political history and this book in particular would make me think we have a good inquiring reader here with powers of concentration as this is quite a hefty tome and needs staying power. As a fellow history lover I would feel in good congenial company. Ah, and the lover of McCall Smith’s books would have a sense of the ridiculous and the whimsical and, at the same time, would probably have a soft heart and a warm sense of humour

Happy Friday, one and all. Still lots of wonderful choices to come in My Life in Books – hasn’t it been fun so far? Maybe you’ve been thinking up your own choices… I’d love to see other people try this out on their blogs. Let me know if you’ve posted your own choices!

Thomas lives in Washington, and blogs at My Porch. Of course, I love all the folk who’ve chosen books this week, but I especially love Thomas’ blog and his witty, sensitive, and occasionally wry look at a great range of books.

Annabel lives in Oxfordshire, and is known to the blogging world as Gaskella. She and I first ‘met’ when we shared quotations on the back of Angela Young’s wonderful novel Speaking of Love.

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.

Thomas: I perceived that I grew up in a book-loving household, but it may not have been so. I remember my dad read fairly often, and my mom traded paperbacks with other women. It was certainly enough for me to recognize that reading was something worth doing, but we didn’t have lots of books in the house by any means. But we did live two blocks from the library where I spent a lot of time. When I first contemplated which book would stand out from my youth I immediately thought of The Ark by Margot Benary-Isbert. As I thought more about it, I realized it was an early example of my attraction to housekeeping novels with a cozy twist. Post-war Germany, family living on a farm in two old railroad cars. If you have any doubts, just check out the cover art of the copy I read as a child.

Annabel: Yes – our house was always full of books. My parents read to us from a big book of 365 bedtime stories, but as an early reader, once I was onto proper books I read by myself avidly. The weekly visit to the library was a weekend ritual, and I still have my pile of Puffin paperbacks of many children’s classics. Alice in Wonderland was one of the ones I returned to frequently – I loved the sheer fantasy of it all and wished I could have such wonderful adventures. I love the way that Alice stands up to everyone including the Queen of Hearts in that childlike way that questions everything. I love the inventive language too – I can still recite ‘Jabberwocky’ which I memorised as a child.

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

Thomas: The first “grown-up” book I read was trash. It was Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews. Pulp fiction about kids forced to live in an attic with a little incest thrown in. I was probably about 12 when I read it. Definitely not meant for my age group. The first “serious” grown-up book was A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White. Although a classic of gay fiction, it was a little over my head at 15. Still, I was eager for anything with a gay theme.

Annabel: It’s not the first, but this is one of my earliest grown-up reads that always sticks out in my mind – Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov. My Dad & I always ran the bookstall at the Guides jumble sale, and I got it there. It was the first proper Science Fiction book I read and was responsible for an enduring love of that genre – I read nothing but SF and fantasy as a student an in my early twenties. Fantastic Voyage was foremost an adventure, and was full of pacy thrills – could the microminiaturised submarine finish its healing job inside a man’s body in time before the effect wears off? Turns out Asimov wrote the novelisation of the film, not the original story, but I still loved it.

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.

Thomas: I remember many from 20s that I loved, but in terms of books that had an effect on my life (at least at the time) I would have to say A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I avoided reading it because it didn’t seem like my kind of book. But I finally gave in and loved it. It also helped me get control of my life in a kind of roundabout, but very important way.

Annabel: TV adaptations of modern classics were probably responsible for bringing me back to reading ‘proper books’ again. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which the BBC televised in 1985, really struck a chord with me. Having holidayed in many of that book’s locations – the mountains above Montreux (where there really is a famous sanitarium), and the Riviera, I found that real sense of place gave an added dimension. As with Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises I got a rather vicarious pleasure and sense of schadenfreude reading about all these posh folk gadding about, getting drunk, and seeming to be waiting for life to happen to them, rather than the other way around.

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

Thomas: Such a tough question. I could never name just one book. Authors who have come into my life in the last five years who I think are brilliant include May Sarton and Barbara Pym. And then I would have to include the entire Persephone List, which has been, by far, the most important discovery for me. Although does it count as a discovery if it was other bloggers that led me to it? The biggest change from blogging and reading book blogs is that I am now more likely to listen to bloggers than people I actually know when it comes to fiction.

Annabel: Since I started my blog, one of the things I’m particularly enjoying is reading some amazing teen and young adult books. The best of which differ only from novels for grown-ups in that the main protagonists tend to be younger, (and there’s less swearing and risqué bits). The quality of the writing can be top-notch. Marcus Sedgwick and Philip Reeve have been amazing discoveries, and Reeve just gets in first with Here Lies Arthur – a retelling of King Arthur’s story as seen by Merlin’s apprentice – and it’s all spin, no magic. Very brave and different – and it won him a Carnegie Medal.

Blogging has and hasn’t changed my reading habits. I was a member of a book group for years before I started blogging, so I’ve always read a diverse range of books (except for during my SF/Fantasy phase above). Quantity-wise I’m fairly consistent too. What has changed is the way I now think so much more about what I read – I don’t want to write too much rubbish on the blog! I also get many recommendations from reading other blogs, and it’s wonderful to have made so many blog-friends through books.

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Thomas: There is nothing I read that I would consider a guilty pleasure. Bad TV. Now that is a guilty pleasure.

Annabel: I’m never embarrassed by any of the books I read, but there is a time and a place for devouring a ludicrous thriller – get the right setting and even Dan Brown can be a fun read. However my guilty pleasure is far better than that – being a teenager in the 1970s, I’ve more or less grown up with James Bond. My first Bond books came from the Guides jumble sales too and I still love them. I was surprised when I re-read Casino Royale a couple of years ago – the first Bond book in which he gets his licence to kill, but he doesn’t start off as quite the bastard he will later become!

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

Annabel, about Thomas’ choices: Shockingly I’ve only read one of these choices myself (Owen Meany, which I enjoyed), although I’ve been intending to read Barbara Pym for ages. Flowers in the Attic was such a shocker, everyone was reading it. I was on my Science Fiction kick by then and resisted, but it was the book to read. Everyone needs to watch some bad television – it’s very therapeutic. This is an interesting set from someone who obviously has read widely throughout their life.

Thomas, about Annabel’s choices: I have only read the Fitzgerald so I think we may have very different reading interests. I am prone to say she is mid-twenties and definitely likes to read about other worlds. From Alice’s fantasy to science fiction to the world of 007. Even Tender is the Night is a world that most of us can only really see from the outside. Based on these choices I am going to go out on a limb and suggest she might like Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey (not Peter Carey). [Simon: Oo, I think she might – I *love* Edward Carey too.]

Hope you’re having a fun week so far – I definitely am. We’re on our fourth couple of readers, with three more to come after today – I hope you’ve been picking up lots of suggestions, as well as revisiting much-loved books from your own life.

Darlene lives in Ontario, Canada and blogs at Roses Over A Cottage Door. She’s one of those lovely bloggers who started as a blog-reader, and was persuaded to join the blogging masses – we’re so glad you did, Darlene!

Peter lives in Somerset, England, and is better known here as Our Vicar, for he is my father. He is the only member of our family not to have a blog… yet!

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.

Darlene: (Cue the violin music) Books were almost completely absent from my household growing up and I have only one memory of being read to by my mother. What we did have was a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and I loved each and every volume. Being an information junkie from the age of four (I would listen to news stories and run into the kitchen to repeat them to my parents) this collection suited me perfectly. Everything I could have wanted to know from aardvarks to zebras was contained within those pages and was perfect for dipping in and out of.

Peter: We didn’t have a lot of books at home – one bookshelf in the main room – maybe a hundred or so books. I don’t remember many of them – one was a Bible (which I still have – given to my mother at the age of 12). I’m not sure about children’s books, but Brer Rabbit was there somewhere, alongside some books about Golliwoggs, and some Enid Blyton.

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

Darlene: I remember the first grown-up book I enjoyed, it was called Karen and was about Karen Killilea, a girl with cerebral palsy (told you, information junkie), written by her mother Marie. I had finally convinced the woman who drove the library bookmobile to let me sign out a book from the adult side of the van. When I was in Grade 5, unbeknownst to me, I was labeled a ‘gifted reader’. A couple of times a week the principal of the school would collect me from class and I had to sit in another classroom and read with him. For the longest time I thought it was because I was naughty but really it was because the rest of class was reading books way too easy for me. Adults didn’t inform children about things in those days, you just went along.

Peter: One of the books on the shelf was Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather – I don’t know what happened to that, but I remember writing an essay in secondary school about the Battle of Sheriffmuir (1715) and expanding Scott’s version and thinking maybe nobody’s ever written such a long account of the battle. The first grown up novels I read were probably those by PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan-Doyle.

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.

Darlene: It was all about Jane Austen in my late 20s and early 30s so I would have to say Pride and Prejudice. Her writing just seemed to always feel right. Whenever I would veer towards other genres I would eventually reach a saturation point, be left wanting, and end up returning to Austen where there was usually something new to admire or laugh at depending on your mood. And if you don’t have an English accent, you’ve read at least part of her books out loud just to see if you could pull it off. I can’t!

Peter: I spent much of the time in my 20s and 30s reading Maths and Theology books, for my degrees in those subjects. These include The History of Maths by Carl B Boyer – a fascinating account; and The History of Israel by John Bright – covering the Old Testament from an historian’s perspective. It was also during this time that I started reading Thomas Hardy’s novels – my favourites being Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure. [Simon: to this day, I think Hardy is the only novelist I have heard Dad mention favourably!]

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

Darlene: There has been so many favourite books over the past few years but for this venture I am going to choose Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. I love that book and could not believe my luck when Nicola Beauman hosted a book chat on said book at Persephone while I just happened to be visiting London. It took that particular reading experience up a notch and I will never forget it. Reading blogs has enriched my life beyond all measure. Growing up in a household that did not value books or education as much as I did left me feeling isolated and out of place. This community of booklovers has been my classroom and when you write something, be assured that I am paying attention and learning. For as long as I can remember there has always been a book on my nightstand, since discovering blogs there are now stacks!

Peter: In recent years I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and begun (but, several years down the line, not yet finished) Lord of the Rings, having been persuaded to try these by Simon and Colin respectively. Under my own steam, I’ve enjoyed reading a couple of Bill Bryson books – particularly A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Darlene: The Daily Telegraph is my guilty pleasure once or twice a month. Because it comes from outside the country it costs a ridiculous amount but I don’t care. My husband knows I would rather have that than a bouquet of flowers and I pore over every detail. Can I buy the items advertised on sale at Boots or Sainsburys…no, but I love looking anyway. And I love choosing which play I would see at the weekend if I could just hop on a train or exhibit to drop by and scrutinize. It’s like a mini-holiday in a newspaper and is always accompanied by a pot of tea and some cake.

Peter: I remember buying my first Guinness Book of Records when I was 10 – and have occasionally snuck one onto the house over the years.

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

Peter, about Darlene’s choices: This lady – and why do I presume a lady when the inclusion of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a quality English broadsheet could easily have been on my list? This person obviously followed Stuck-in-a-Book’s suggestion from September 2009 to start Dorothy Whipple with Someone at a Distance. My guess – sensitive (somewhere in the caring professions?), conservative (unlikely to be reading Stieg Larrson), aware of the world (and the Telegraph also suggests a conservatism) and interested in learning (still reading history and biography as well as novels) – this strikes me as a very interesting lady.

Darlene, about Peter’s choices: In my humble opinion, the person who chose these books is witty, intelligent, supremely curious and has an eye for detail. Going out on a limb I am going to suggest this person has achieved higher education and far from considering it something to get through, they really enjoyed the process. They would love to live in the countryside but have to live close to the city, they’re happy with their own company but enjoy a laugh with friends as well. And last but not least…there is a much-loved cosy cardigan somewhere amongst their clothes.

We’re on Day Three, and late tonight I will be coming back from Paris, to see how things are going… but, fear not, we’re not even halfway yet. Plenty more to come from your favourite bloggers and blog-readers!

Lisa lives in Chicago, and has been blogging as Bluestalking Reader for many years. She’s a librarian, and was responsible for introducing me to Shirley Jackson – thanks, Lisa!

Victoria lives in Cambridge, but I’m bridging the Oxford/Cambridge enmity to invite her here today! She is well known for her informed and thorough blog posts at Tales from the Reading Room, and might be better known around the blogosphere as ‘lit love’.

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

Lisa: My parents did read to me, and enrolled me in a children’s book of the month club. That’s probably when my bibliomania started. Waiting for each new book taught me to feel a lot of excitement about them. Otherwise, though my oldest brother was moderately fond of reading no, it wasn’t a very bookish household. I definitely had the most books of anyone in the family. By far!

My favorite book as a child was a Richard Scarry book of nursery rhymes. I don’t recall the exact title. I was fascinated by the illustrations of cartoonish animals and read the book ’til it fell apart!

Victoria: Both my parents were keen readers, and we had a lot of books about the place. My father used to belong to the Reader’s Digest club and one bookcase was full of their books that he had rebound himself in red, blue and green mock leather. I remember a friend calling around for the first time, looking at the books in awe, and finally asking ‘Are those video cassettes?’ Both my parents read to me, although it wasn’t long before I preferred reading to myself because I could go quicker in my head. But my father loved reading the Paddington stories and those were real childhood favourites. I think the magic of Paddington lies in the fact that he can be so endearing whilst getting everything wrong – the table whose legs he ends up sawing off completely because he can’t make them level, the bacon trailing from his suitcase and attracting all the dogs in the neighbourhood. It’s a child’s dream – to make mistakes and still be lovable.

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

Lisa: It’s hard to recall what would have been first, so I’ll say The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I remember it taking a long time to get through them, but they were gripping. That started me on a short fantasy spree I didn’t indulge again until the Harry Potter books.

It’s difficult to remember what was going on at the time, but I must have been around 10 or 11 years old, which leads me to believe these weren’t my first adult books. But they were challenging for me at that age. Really I was just a bookish kid most happy when I was solitary, which is still largely true – save the kid part! I hated school, but did well, especially in English literature courses, which were a joy.

Victoria: When I was 11 I tried to read my first Agatha Christie. I have no idea why it was so important to me to read her – some sort of instinctual attraction. But the book gave me such nightmares that my mother forbade them for another year. As soon as I hit 12, I was back on the Christie sugar. That year, my brother (much older than me) had left home to live and work in London, and I was on my own in the school holidays. I’d grown up enough not to lose sleep over crime fiction, but not enough to feel secure alone in the house when reading about murder and mayhem. I spent most mornings quietly terrified and avidly sucking down Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple regardless.

Oddly enough, I can see now that crime fiction is really about creating security for the reader; it assures us that there is a clear line between guilt and innocence, good and bad, and that society is set up to protect the vulnerable. I loved the feeling of resolution and certainty that came with the conclusion, even if I had to go through all kinds of anxiety to get there.

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.

Lisa: There were two books I read around this time, introducing me to the “magical realism” and “stream-of-consciousness” styles. But if I must pick one it would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was astounded by it! It taught me all new things about what’s possible to create in prose. The journal I write now is somewhat “stream-of-consciousness,” though I haven’t written anything using “magical realism.” I’m intimidated by that. The other book, by the way, was Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Victoria: Across my mid-twenties I was writing a PhD on Colette and Marguerite Duras, two French 20th century authors. They had a huge influence on me, as both wrote about the way we use fictions of one kind or another to create and sustain our identities. But they had such different ways of approaching the problem. For Colette, the body and the mind were infinitely flexible; one could become a chameleon and adapt over and over to changing circumstances, shedding skins with practiced ease. Duras believed that life scars us with certain profoundly significant events and, one way or another, we are always trying to recreate them, or understand them; and whilst narrative is the only means at our disposal, it is never the same as the experience itself.

This is a swizz, I know, picking the entire oeuvres of two authors when the question asks for one book, but I just couldn’t choose; I’ve veered back and forth between their different ways of thinking ever since, uncertain quite what I believe.

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

Lisa: There are so many! I’ll choose David Toscana’s book The Last Reader, about a librarian in a small Central American town who works at a library that essentially no one but himself uses. It’s like Don Quixote, in a way, as the librarian relates everything he reads to his real life, and immediately tosses any books that don’t fit his experiences. A strange yet wonderful book. Blogging! Ah, it’s changed my life in so many ways. Reading the blogs of others has led me to add far too many books to my reading list (!), and writing my own blog has both helped me keep track of my reading and thoughts on what I read, and disciplined me to write regularly about books. Writing a blog has also taught me to be more analytical about books, to look for themes, for instance, and how a book is structured rather than reading less critically.

Victoria: Blogs have had such a huge effect on my reading. I thought I read widely, but I certainly had my eyes opened when I came to blogging and realized quite how narrow and restrained I’d been. I’d never read an American novel before (unless we count the Sweet Valley High series, which I am disinclined to do) [Simon: I was so pleased to hear someone else confessing to reading these!] and now I am a massive fan of American literature. One of my favourite novels of the past few years has been The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald. I have a soft spot in my heart for doomed longing and narrators who are there for the eye witness account, and if you add in Fitzgerald’s glorious prose and his exquisite sense of queasily sated hedonism, well, naturally you have a masterpiece.

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Lisa: I’ll go with Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series. I generally like my mysteries to be British in setting, but in a bucolic, small village region rather than a city. So I was suprised how much I enjoy Rankin and consider myself hooked!

Victoria: I have a real taste for the blockbuster novel. Many years ago I attended a very high-powered reading group at the university, and the talk fell to childhood reading. One of the dons there was expounding on Homer’s Odyssey and how much he had loved this book as a boy and how he had read it over and over, with the others in the group fervently agreeing. I’d never read any Homer, and went home with that dreary feeling of being a dullard and a light-weight. ‘Ah but no one in that room knew as much about Jilly Cooper as you do,’ my husband comforted me. And I took a distinct pride in the fact that that was certainly true. And if I had to choose between rereading Riders, or rereading The Odyssey, there’s no doubt in my mind which one it would be…

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

Victoria, about Lisa’s choices: Scarry’s nursery rhymes – Scarry is the epitome of charming, wholesome delight, and is probably responsible for this country’s obsession with talking meercats. Lord of the Rings – is it wrong of me to see a sort of continuation of the Scarry theme here? A sort of What Do People Do All Day in Middle Earth? But to get through Tolkein’s massive volumes at an early age is the sign of a truly dedicated reader, I’m sure. One Hundred Years of Solitude – difficult, demanding, and yet sensuous and playful too. It’s highly sophisticated narrative, though, so I would think it appeals most to the very experienced reader, and one not afraid of reading very different and unusual books. David Toscana – I had to look this book up, but it turns out to be magical realism, same as Marquez. It’s a niche interest, which again makes me think of a very particular, sophisticated and intellectual sort of reader. Ian Rankin – ah a bit of grit. Magic realism is often violent, so no surprises to find a dark and violent sort of writer on the list. Rankin is good at creating his own world, much like Marquez and Tolkein, too. A reader who loves to be completely immersed in his books, then, who wants to be taken to a different world when he reads. And I think it’s a man. [Simon: Oops!] And someone with a university education, possibly with a literary element.

Lisa, about Victoria’s choices: I would venture to guess this reader is someone who values relationships and the romantic ideal. For some reason I also see this person as someone who enjoys independent films, perhaps in translation, and is comfortable with endings left somewhat uncertain. This is harder than it looks at first!

Hope you’re enjoying the week so far (and, importantly, that the formatting and whatnot has all worked out… I’m leaving it all to spring up of its own accord, and crossing my fingers that it works out) – let’s introduce the lovely folk for Day Two!

Lyn lives in Melbourne, Australia and was responsible for introducing me to the world of Persephone Books. She blogs at I Prefer Reading.

Anne lives in Somerset, England and was responsible for introducing me to the world (!) since she is my mother, better known here as Our Vicar’s Wife, and blogs under that moniker here. [Simon: link fixed now!]

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.

Lyn: I’ve always loved books although my parents weren’t big readers. Too busy working and they both left school at 13. They must have read to me when I was very young but I could read myself by the time I was 4, so after that, I read to myself. Mum & Dad always bought me books and I always asked for a book if there was a treat on offer. My favourite book as a child was probably The Youngest Lady in Waiting by Mara Kay. It’s about a girl who becomes lady-in-waiting to Grand Duchess Alexandra at the court of Alexander I and gets involved in the Decembrist uprising. It led me onto my interest in Russian and royal literature and history, which I still love today.

Anne: My family enjoyed books – although there weren’t huge numbers of them in the house. Most Saturday mornings found us at the library borrowing up to six books (I think). From there we went to the sweet shop where I usually bought 4oz of ‘chewing nuts’ which were a kind of chocolate covered toffee. During the afternoon you would find me lying on my tummy on the bed, hand dipping into the sweets and brain absorbing the first book from the book pile – so my mind was fed and my teeth rotted!

An early book I can remember enjoying was The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by Anthony Hope. I had no idea it was published so long before – it was timeless to me. A real adventure story set in the fictional Ruritania – full of derring do! It made an Easter holiday magical – curled up by the fire, breath held against the next twist in the plot! (Of course, I also adored the William books, Anne of Green Gables etc. and even Biggles – but I guess this is cheating!)

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

Lyn: Probably Jean Plaidy’s historical novels. I was 12 or 13 and loved history. We didn’t study British or European history at school so I found my way to non-fiction history through Jean Plaidy and a lot of other historical novelists, some better and more accurate than others.

Anne: My first ‘grown-up book’ has to be Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I read this first as a child – just as far as her leaving Lowood. After that it was ‘grown-up’ and I lost interest. I returned to it a couple of years later – this time I was infuriated by its missing out the ‘teenage’ years – I felt that it had nothing to say about me as I was then – it ignored those years and the age of 18 seemed a grown-up goal a thousand miles away! Third time lucky! I tried again when I was nearer the magic age of 18 – suddenly the book was released to me – I could enjoy it in its entirety! I can think of no other book which I read in chunks like this – this one was unique! (I should say too, that this was the time I really looked for books with Annes in them – add Persuasion to the list!)

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.

Lyn: The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield. I was around 30, working in my first job as a librarian and the branch manager (we still work together in the same library service) recommended the Provincial Lady to me. I laughed at Lady B and the bulbs on page 1 and didn’t stop laughing all the way through & that’s how I fell in love with the middlebrow novel of the 1920s & 30s.

Anne: My twenties were spent busily learning to be a teacher. At the end of the day I enjoyed nothing better than a Miss Read or an escapist romance to lull me off to sleep – good old Georgette Heyer! However, the book I am choosing is not by either of them – it is Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier. I have no idea how many times I read and re-read that book! I pored over maps of the area, I took a holiday – my first all alone – down on The Lizard and I plodded along the country lanes and footpaths all around the Creek on a romantic quest. For me the attraction was the book’s idea of running away from a life confined by others’ expectations and being free to be oneself – the fact that there was a gorgeous French philosopher pirate in the mix made it all the more enjoyable. I loved the romance and the adventure – the understated sex scenes and the violent jealousy and possessiveness of Rockingham. Her treatment of Dona’s husband was kind, if pitying and the descriptions of Cornwall lured me there. I cried every time I got to the farewell at Looe Pool – not least because I was reaching the end of the book and it would be a while before I allowed myself to read it again! And at the end, the inevitability of Dona’s tame, encumbered life made sense to me – I would never be brave enough, or sufficiently lacking in commitment, to leave everything and run away!

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

Lyn: Nella Last’s War. An earlier edition of Nella’s Diaries sat on the shelf at Ringwood Library all the years I worked there but I never picked it up. Only about three years ago when the book was reprinted and when I’d read other WWII diaries, letters & novels, did I read it. Since then, I’ve read the two further volumes of Nella’s Diaries & I’m really sorry that there will be no more. Blogging and reading blogs has reminded me of books I have on the tbr shelves and prompted me to get them down and read them. It’s also introduced me to new authors and imprints that I might not have found on my own. The internet in general and our online reading group in particular, has widened my reading horizons.

Anne: I adored The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer. There are maybe more worthy books and more affecting books that I have read in the last five years, but that stands out as a jewel of a book, which was a pure pleasure to read. Perhaps it was partly because the author was over 70 – it gave me hope that it may not be too late to write ‘my’ book! As for literary blogs – I am SO proud of yours, Simon, and I love reading it [Simon: thanks, Mum!] – but find myself defeated by the tbr pile it is helping to increase – have I enough years left to read all the books I’d like to read?

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Lyn: I’m very predictable. I know my tastes and I don’t stray too far outside them. Life’s too short and I have so many books I want to read in my favourite subjects and periods that I can’t fit in anything new. As to guilty pleasures, English women’s magazines like The Lady and Good Housekeeping, when I can get them. [Simon: the cover I’ve chosen isn’t an English edition of the magazine, but… it is lovely, isn’t it?!]

Anne: My guilty pleasure – mmm… there are so many! Maybe it is time with the Misses Bennett as I take one more turn around the ballroom with Jane and Bingley, or Elizabeth and Darcy… after all… with so many books unread, should I really be re-reading Jane Austen for the umpteenth time?

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

Anne, about Lyn’s choices: I think this person (definitely a woman) had a conventional education – Jean Plaidy’s books would have appealed to her because of their historical accuracy and the way they get inside the mind of the central character(s). The Provincial Lady shows an appreciation of wit and the ‘sending up’ of the ridiculous – whilst having a real understanding of human nature under a variety of circumstances. Nella Last – ah, the historical theme again – and more intense reading of the female mind when she is ‘up against it’; the magazines again hark back to a different age.

This person appreciates the comfort and familiarity of a home well-made. She likes to get ‘under the skin’ of other people – in the sense of understanding how they tick. She knows her stuff when it comes to history. I think she has lived through changing times and regrets the loss of some of the niceties of a lost age. I’d like to invite her to tea!

Lyn, about Anne’s choices: Probably easier to give a few attributes for the lover of these books. All of them seem to involve romance in some form.

Prisoner of Zenda – romantic, lover of lost causes.
Jane Eyre – independent, passionate, moral.
Frenchman’s Creek – romantic, adventurous, restless.
Guernsey – literary, curious, compassionate.
Pride & Prejudice – romantic, well-mannered, correct.

Hopefully this format will have become second nature to us all by the end of the week, but we’d better have a run-through for the first day. I’m asking all this week’s participants the same five questions – to make it feel more like a conversation, I’ll give both participants’ answers after each question, cunningly colour-coding them to avoid confusion. Orange is me, with my mantle as question-master. Once all the books have been revealed, there is a little bonus section. Rather than asking people what they think their book choices say about them, I asked them to assess their co-participant’s choices – but without knowing with whom they were paired! Let’s see what books really say about their readers…

Without further ado, let’s introduce the first two readers:

Karen lives in Edinburgh and is one of the country’s best known and most-loved bloggers – known as Cornflower, she somehow manages to write two blogs: Cornflower and Cornflower Books.

Susan lives in Texas, and is indeed known to many of us simply as ‘Susan in TX’. She is the first of this week’s readers to be that most generous and beloved of creatures – the blog-reader, rather than blogger.

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: I did grow up in a book-loving household, I was read to as a child, and I would spend hours looking at my parents’ books, browsing, admiring the jackets of some or wondering about the contents of others. They were and are so familiar to me as objects, as well as being a source of interest and entertainment, and from early on I saw books as ways into marvellous other worlds, ones you could hold in your hand. At my grandparents’ house I would sit on the floor behind the settee, while the grown-ups talked, looking at everything in the big bookcase there from medical textbooks to history, classics to popular fiction. If I close my eyes I can still ‘see’ them all, and remember their lovely old-book smell. A favourite book from when I was 7 or 8 is Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle – judging by the signs of wear and tear I read it often in those early years. I had others in the series, but that one stands out particularly: “Dr. Dolittle had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar, and he lived on sixpence a year.” And we mustn’t forget Jip, the dog, who when an old boy, stayed at home to look after the other animals when the doctor was away.

Susan: I once heard a preacher say, “what parents do in moderation, their children will do to excess – whether good or bad.” That is certainly true regarding my upbringing and book-love. My mother was a public school librarian before she had children (in her day, if you got pregnant, you had to retire), so we were read to at home, taken to the library during the summers (we used the school library during the school year), and allowed to purchase to our heart’s content from the Scholastic fliers that came home from school. (My parents had NO idea the book-acquiring monster they were creating at the time!)

My favorite book from childhood is probably considered politically incorrect today; it was Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Stories (a giant goldenbook). What made it our favorite (and it was everybody’s favorite) was my mother’s reading – she would read in the dialect that it was written in, so if you shut your eyes (which we would never do because we loved the Disney illustrations) you would’ve thought Uncle Remus himself was telling the story. Never mind Brer Rabbit’s ability to continually out-fox Brer Fox kept us in giggles. There was one very “scary” story with a picture of a huge snake towards the back. She would never read that one at night lest we have nightmares. We once tried to record her reading some of the stories so we would always have them, but the cassette tape got lost. We have enjoyed listening to her read them to our children, though – and they are still favorites, even among the grandchildren.

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

Karen: The first grown-up books I remember reading were by Monica Dickens (whose Mariana is now published by Persephone). They belonged to my mother, and I have only the vaguest memories of One Pair of Hands, and later One Pair of Feet, but I recall being very taken by these accounts of life as a cook-general and a trainee nurse. Funny, lively and engaging, and a glimpse of the adult world.

Susan: This is a harder question due to my poor memory, but around the age of 13 I had a school teacher who encouraged me to read Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which set off the domino effect of reading and acquiring all of the books she had written that I could get my hands on (and which I still have!) I still remember how surprised I was at the outcome of Roger Ackroyd, and as I have begun introducing Dame Agatha to my own kids, it is always the first one I give them. [Simon: but of course we shan’t give the game away!]

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: You’ve asked for a favourite from my 20s or 30s, but a significant book from my late teens, one which really did determine the direction I took in life, was To Kill a Mockingbird. I wonder how many young people, in the 50 years since the book was first published, have taken Atticus Finch as a role model and joined the legal profession as a result. That’s what happened to me, so thank you, Harper Lee!

Susan: Sometime in my early 30s I picked up The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. Aside from the Bible, this book has probably had the single greatest impact on my life. Subtitled A Guide to a Classical Education at Home, it was this book that convinced me that educating my children at home was not only possible, but would be the best education that I could provide for them. FAR, FAR from what I thought I would be doing, but I can say without hesitation, the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life. We’ve now been at this for about 12 years. Absolutely it is hard work. That is not to be denied. But the return on the investment is worth every minute. It’s not for everyone (none of our siblings homeschool their kids, and they all think we are crazy – like many reading this may), but it has worked well for us.

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

Karen: A favourite book from the last five years, one I often mention – and give away – is One Fine Day by Mollie Panter Downes. Having read the two collections of her short stories which Persephone publish I was keen to read her only ‘adult’ novel (she published two others when still a teenager) and it was all I had hoped it would be. A beautifully drawn portrait of a single day in an English village in 1946, of a typical family and a vanished way of life, every well-chosen word counts and reflects the world its author knew so well. As for how blogging has changed my reading habits – I read far more now than I have ever done before, I read more critically, because I have to write about most of what I read, and I’ve discovered so many books as a result of the passions and interests of other bloggers and blog readers – and met such nice people! So something which I started in a hesitant, unsure way has taken over my life and led to a great many good things.

Susan: One of my favorite books I’ve found in the last 5 years is a virtual “unknown,” The Hawk and the Dove Trilogy by Penelope Wilcock. If it had been up to the book blurb, I would’ve never picked it up – the blurb sounds like a soap opera, and doesn’t fit the contents of the book at all. However, a good friend put me on to it. There are very few books that have ever kept me thinking past the last page, but this book had me pondering for a while afterwards. There is much to consider about suffering, friendship, and grace. (Read it when it’s cold outside, in front of a fire!)

As to how blogging/reading blogs has changed my reading habits? Hmmm. Not sure that my habits have changed all that much. As I said earlier, I’ve been a compulsive book buyer since my early childhood, so I can’t blame the blog world for my TBR shelf. :) Blogs have definitely introduced me to authors I probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise – Stuck-in-a-Book chief among them, Simon! [Simon: Why, thank you!] And “challenges” have introduced me to a whole new nerdy way of keeping records!

Qu. 5) For your final choice – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!

Karen: Mary Portas’ shop reviews and the wonderful Social Stereotypes column, both in the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine. I read them over breakfast (always special pastries and coffee), and woe betide the paper boy if he’s late and I don’t get to combine those two particular pleasures!

Susan: Ah, the guilty pleasures. I’ll give you two. The Stephanie Barron Jane Austen Mysteries are a lot of fun, and I eagerly await each new release. Also, thanks to C.S. Forester I have a love of Napoleonic war naval adventures which had me racing through all the Hornblower books and led me on to the Master and Commander series which I’m reading a little slower to make them last longer. Check that, I’ll give you a third – Harry Potter. ;)

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

Susan, about Karen’s choices: What a great book list! I’m guessing this person either grew up in the UK, or is an anglophile (like myself!) They likely had a fondness for animals in their younger years, and perhaps studied American literature in high school/college/university. They obviously have an appreciation for literature set during World War 2. And with those guilty pleasures, this person likes to keep a finger on the pulse of the finer things in life, but with a responsible hold on their pocketbook. This economic prudence thus provides them with more spending money with which to feed their love of books. :)

Karen, about Susan’s choices: I read Brer Rabbit and Mr. Fox as a child, and I loved them, so we have common ground. Likewise with the Agatha Christie, as I read her, too, and she does seem to be a writer who is good for the child/adult transition – no nastiness, apart from a murder, of course, but that’s ‘off-screen’, otherwise correct behaviour, the satisfactory solving of a puzzle and thus putting the world back to rights, in a way. Order out of chaos, and a keen observer with a brilliantly deductive mind who can be relied upon in a crisis – it’s an appealing combination. I hadn’t come across The Well-Trained Mind, but a quick look up tells me this is for someone who will put every effort into supporting – or providing – their children’s education. This is someone for whom learning, either just for their own interest or to teach others, will be a lifelong pleasure. An interesting person with a keen mind, I’d say. I’ve heard of The Hawk and the Dove trilogy, though not read any of the books, but someone for whom this is a favourite is a spiritual person, a deep-thinker, again open to learning and developing that aspect of their life – as well as enjoying a good story. The guilty pleasures/surprising favourites are all fun, escapist choices, and taking everything together, I think I’d like this person very much indeed!