books of your life - favourite fiction/non- fiction which you always return to/has a special place in your heart...

[MaryAnnSingleton]

So many books read recently fail to stick in my mind..so here is a list of books that I will always hold dear to me...do let me know yours... so in no particular order..

1. Jade Tales - Micheline Murel (sp) no loger have this but was a beautifully illustrated childhood book
2. A Child's Christmas in Wales - Dylan Thomas and illustrated by Edward Ardizzone
3. A Country Child - Alison Uttley
4. Cold Comfort Farm- Stella Gibbons
5. Up the Junction - Nell Dunn
6. The L Shaped Room - Lynne Reid Banks
7. The Front Runner - Patricia Nell Warren
8. All of the Tales of The City books - Armistead Maupin
9. Before I say Goodbye - Ruth Picardie

10. Persuasion - Jane Austen 11. Madam, Will You Talk - Mary Stewart ...think that's all...

oh I forgot to put
12. The Outsider - Albert Camus

When I was a girl I read avidly the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary..I still read them now!

They sum up perfectly what it is like to be a freckly, slightly awkward seven year old girl. (Which is what I still am inside )

Tess of the d'Urbevilles - Thomas Hardy
Ballet Shoes - Noel Streitfeild
Danny the Champion of the World - Roald Dahl

Also in no particular order:

1. I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
2. The Group by Mary McCarthy
3. Jennings goes to School by Anthony Buckeridge
4. Katherine by Anya Seton
5. The world is not enough by Zoe Oldenbourg
6. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
7. The Tales of the City series
8. A place of greater safety by Hilary Mantel
9. Helbeck of Bannisdale by Mrs Humphry Ward

10. La vie mode d'emploi by Georges Perec 11. A traveller in Time by Alison Uttley 12. Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Lively 13. The long way home by Paul Berna 14. The King of the Copper Mountains by Paul Biegel

hooray Marina - was hoping you'd find this !!

And I have something for you MaryAnn - bought Seldom Seen Kid by Elbow at the same time as catching up with Do You Like Rock Music.
I think you would love the Elbow album, given our shared fondness for BSP and Arcade Fire.
They are brilliant. Where have they been all my life!

thanks Marina - my brother sent me an iTunes link to the Elbow album and I really liked what I listened to...
I am also really enjoying the new Goldfrapp

I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Katherine - Anya Seton (waves at Marina)
Antigua, Penny, Puce - Robert Graves

Will ponder.

Anne of Green Gables (when I was a kiddy)

Return of the Native - Hardy (when I was a teen)

Frenchman's Creek (when I was early 20s)

Not exactly highbrow but my favourite books...

Oh yes, Anne of Green Gables - especially the chapter where Matthew dies

Posy Simmonds ... and, a propos, do you remember that strip when WW's dh was enthusing about how he re-reads Bachelard every summer ("Really recharges the batteries!") One of my all-time favourites.

there probably are books that one should re read every year to recharge batteries !

The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner
The Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault
The Praise Singer by Mary Renault
The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Little Women by Louisa Alcott
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell
The Children Of Green Knowe
These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Autumn Term by Antonia Forest

I just read the L Shaped Room and the sequels, thought they were brilliant.

Hmmm...

The Gormenghast trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Firestarter - Stephen King
Frost on my Moustache - Tim Moore
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (good old Ray, I wrote my A level English project on him)
Promethea - Alan Moore, JH WIlliams III, Mick Gray
The Farthest-Away Mountain - Lynne Reid Banks (my favourite book EVER as a child! And still great as an adult. Dakin was my hero )
The Song of Ice and Fire books - George R R Martin

I'm sure there's more, but my books are upstairs and I'm too lazy to refresh my terrible pregnancy memory right now!

Lots that I have enjoyed but the following stick in my mind:
anything by Iris Murdoch
Wizard of Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
The Cornish trilogy by the above
The Claudius novels of Robert Graves
The Bryant and May detectives novels by
Christopher Fowler
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Flashman novels by George McDonald Fraser
The whole of Jane Austen's works

I just spotted Alison Uttley's " A Country Child" on the OP.
Read this at secondary in Year 7 as set text. Hated it. Came back as an adolescent. As compelling as "Lark Rise to Candleford". Wonderful.

"The Little White Horse" Elizabeth Goudge
"Henrietta's House" ditto

The Rufus books by Eleanor Estes

Mary Plain books by Gwynedd Rae

about A Country Child - I think I read it as an older teen - it is a wordy and very descriptive book but that's why I love it so, it just takes me into the countryside ! I gave a copy to a friend's dd when she was 10 so perhaps she didn't take to it - she didn't say !

The Thornbirds - Colleen Mccullough
The Sun in the morning,Golden Afetrnoon and Enchanted Evening - M.M.Kaye
Ans all the James Herriot books - have read them and re-read them since i was about 7.

Oh Wishfort, how could I have forgotten the Salterton and Cornish Trilogies

The book that sends me straight back to the first blurry hours of pre-and-post ds' birth is The Chimney Sweep's Boy by Barbara Vine. Haunting at the best of times

A Country Child, like Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, is vulnerable to being traduced by becoming a set text IMO. Some books are just too subtle.

• Lessico famigliare - Natalia Ginzburg
• short stories - Catherine Mansfield especially the ones with Kezia in them (don't know the titles in English, always read them in Italian ).
• yes Little Women, gave me so much pleasure reading it as a chjild (read it at least 10 times)
• A square of sky - Janina David. I read it when I was 12 for the first time, still stuck in my heart.
• Excellent women - Barbara Pym
• Flight without an end - Joseph Roth

wishfort, I loved The Little White Horse too. It was so fascinating, all the curious words and concepts that I'd never heard of before, like back boards and heliotrope and butter kept cool in the niche in the well and sugar biscuits in a tin in one's bedroom...awesome.

I also really liked Eric Linklater's The Wind On The Moon for similar reasons - I loved the idea of Dinah and Dorinda learning to spend all day doing nothing, and making a living space in a van full of furniture before blithely setting off for a long journey. And I cried over the golden cat