What my mother read!

My granny only ever read the bible. She thought other kinds of reading (particularly novels) was frivolous at best and most likely immoral. I remember her telling me off for reading Anne of Green Gables.

My mum and I swap books all the time and have similar taste. She never ever reads trashy books though and is horrified if she catches me with a Penny Vincenzi or anything like that.

I'm going to have to ask my mum what my granny would have read - I have no idea! I know my grandfather was a big fan of Dickens, but I don't know about Granny. Mum has quite similar tastes to me, and I have nicked a lot of books from her over the years. She's responsible for my love of Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Dunnett, as well as my first tastes of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers, but also for a lot of literary fiction as well. Like MrsTerryPratchett's mother, mine also likes the Russians!

My mum read valley of the dolls too and virgin soldiers. I absolutely loved them both!

Judging from that list I'm your mother's generation, so I'll put a plug in for someone who for years and years was one of my favourite writers and who I think is sadly neglected today. Iris Murdoch.

Mum and I tend to discuss who's going to buy which books for Christmas and birthdays. So that we can then swap them over! There are a few authors and genres that one of us likes but not the other but I'd say a good fifty percent of what is on our keeper bookshelves are the same things. And the same with MIL.

Both my mum and granny read endless books about women who are nurses during the war. Unsurprisingly both my mum and granny were nurses

The Valley of the Dolls

OMG that was myabsolute favourite book in my late teens! I used to finish it and go straight back to the beginning and read it all over again. And again. And again.

Lots of Trollope. I've actually got my late DM's collection of Trollope novels in paper on my shelves because I can't quite bring myself to get rid of them. I read all the Palliser novels as a teenager, & figure some day I'll re-read them, & read the Barchester ones.

Otherwise, (perhaps unsurprisingly) not so different from my usual tastes - politics / current affairs books, Austen / Gaskell etc. Perhaps more literary fiction and less SFF than I've got on my shelves.

My nan - harder to say because in her later years could only read large print, and given her rate of reading she basically worked her way through the library offerings from A to Z. So from that POV, any non-Mills&Boon romance type fiction in large print, heavy on the crime & family sagas but I think by default only!

My mum, who would be in her nineties if she was still alive, read Catherine Cookson, Jean Plaidy and Miss Read. Whereas my dad read history, social science and political biographies.

Their reading tasted divided along what would have been seen as traditional male/female lines back in the day. Neither of them were interested in the sort of books I prefer - classics and modern literary fiction - although at school they had read Dickens and Hardy, and knew many poems off by heart.

My mum read Jean Plaidy and Agatha Christie. And lots of biographies, mostly of old Hollywood movie stars. I remember when I was young (I'm now in my 50s) a copy of The Valley of the Dolls on her bedside table.
Not long before she died I remember her phoning me and telling me about how she'd been sitting up late at night drinking whisky and smoking and reading a great book. It was Bridget Jones' diary!

I don't know about my granny. She didn't have many books in the house but she did go to the library every week. I remember my mum reading books by Barbara Taylor-Bradford and Maisie Moscow (I think) Family saga type stuff. As I got older l, she started to read what I read and passed on to her.

Oh and I love Russian literature so yes I would. Except bastarding, bloody War and Peace. I have tried 5 times. It's the names. Why does everyone have three names, similar to other characters but unrelated to their other names? WHY?

I need someone to rewrite it and call everyone Bob, Fred and Sandra. I'd be able to understand it then.

The Russians.

My mum had Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and all those fun, laugh a minute blokes.

My granny I don't know. A newspaper probably. She was a political woman.