What my mother read!

[tobee]

My mother has always been a great reader. Since lockdown I've found myself reading books that she would have been given for birthdays and Christmases of my childhood!

If I could choose one author from my childhood that my mum read it would be Beryl Bainbridge and from when I was older Edith Wharton.

Just to add a bit more my nana would read PG Wodehouse and Francis Durbridge. My granny would read Mapp and Lucia and Miss Read.

So, if you were inspired by your mum or your grannies what would you be reading? And would you be enjoying their choices?

My Nan read ‘The people’s friend’ - and when I was 8 I loved it too!
My mum and I have very similar tastes and always swap books - some favourites have been ‘Little’ , ‘Washington Black’ and ‘The mermaid and Mrs Hancock’ . I bought her Hamnet for Xmas so I’m hoping to get hold of it as soon as lockdown rules allow!

I'm glad I started this thread!

"Ah, I loved the sound of the library stamp - thwunk - and those big thick plastic library tokens."

Yes I wanted to be a librarian when I was little; was always playing at home.

In fact my mum was a librarian when she first left school. She didn't want me to be a librarian as she hated it. She thought she'd be sitting about reading books all day . Instead she was horrified to find it was filing books and the Dewey decimal system!

Middlemarch is my mum's favourite too.
When she was young she liked Georgette Heyer, Anya Seton.
Elizabeth Jenkins, Henry James, Edith Wharton, no thrillers...perhaps a bit of Robert Harris Roman series.
My father reads no fiction at all, apart from Thomas Hardy, as a young man. Only non fiction, history.

I remember that my parents had all the James bond books on the shelf I used to read those, as a child and Desmond Morris .....what was it the naked ape 🤔
Other than that nothing whatsoever in common Im a non-fiction science type reader

My Nanna loved a Catherine Cookson as they were very similar to her own life, NE/Yorkshire working class girl. The RNIB talking books were a godsend to her.

I only ever saw my Gran with a newspaper and a magnifying glass the size of her head, I have one now too and it just makes me smile.

My mum reads historical fiction, she loves Philippa Gregory et al.

My dad was a spy novel type guy, I bought him the full series (3books at the time) of CJ Sansom's Shardlake, he turned his nose up but said he'd read them, he blasted through them and passed them to my mum, then my sister, then a friend lol

I loved Valley off the Dolls when I was a teenager and Dorothy L Sayers.
DH never reads, I have no idea why I married him!

My grandmothers were both serious readers, I would read more Dickens if I were following them, plus novels in the original French, Pepys' diaries and in both cases a range of hefty nonfiction, history in one case and science in the other. My father's mother also loved travel writing and the last thing I remember her reading was all of Patrick Leigh Fermor. She also really enjoyed the Cazalet Chronicles at least partly because she grew up near Elizabeth Jane Howard's home and knew the family.

My mother was a voracious reader and I do read like her. Growing up she shared Georgette Hever and Dick Francis and Molesworth and Dorothy Sayers with me as well as Jane Austen but really her legacy to me was just that reading was the ultimate pleasure,.a drug.

I have lots of children's books that Granny gave me - E. Nesbit, LM Montgomery and Kipling. Plus all the Beatrix Potters. I also have all her Georgette Heyers and her copy of Sanditon (by Jane Austen and Another Lady.) Walpole's Jeremy Stories. She had a lot of crime fiction, but my parents sold a lot of those to specialist collectors (they were mostly original green Penguins), so I only have a handful. I also have some of her non-fiction books, on philosophy and Greek myths, and a first edition of Virginia Wolf's a Room of One's Own. And a copy of Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin, which she copied out and added watercolour illustrations on every page.

From Mum, I have all her EF Benson, Edna O'Brien, Margaret Foster, Margaret Drabble, RF Delderfield, Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga, and various classics like the Brontes, Tolstoy, Mrs Gaskell and others (some may also be Granny's.) Also the Female Eunuch and some books about Suffragettes. Some cookery books. And some of her books on the Archers, which were one of the few things my sister and I argued over when we cleared house after Mum died.

From Dad, I have James Herriot, Ian Fleming, Neville Shute, all the PoW escape stories, and some children's books.

From them both, I have Alexander Cordell, various books on industrial history and wildlife.

The oldest inherited book I have is from the 1680s or something.

I spent a lot of my childhood in the library. I did work in libraries, and probably still would have, if IT didn't pay a lot more but I quite like living above the breadline.

I too had a library when I was small. My cuddly toys used to borrow the books...

Libraries ain’t what they were. “Discovery centres” indeed. They now seem to be noisy “fun” places full of computers (hogged by smelly men) and kids’ story times etc which are more for mums with giant buggies chatting than for inspiring early appreciation of literature.

I sound a right grump - and only half joking...

I like a good, quiet old style library

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I never knew one of my grandfathers so not sure what he read.

My other grandfather was born in the east end of London in the early twentieth century and was always being given true crime books. And books about American mobsters. I would imagine that there were quite a few east end mobsters in his neighbourhood when he was a youth.

@MrsTerryPratchett I feel your pain with War and Peace - keeping track of all the characters is so hard! And all the war bits are pretty dull tbh unless you're really into military history. And then the whole book ends with what is essentially a massive essay. I managed to plough through it years ago when I was on the Trans Siberian with a bad cold and nothing else to do, but when the BBC did that adaptation I realised I didn't remember a single bit of the plot

I have no idea what my granny liked reading in general although she was enjoying a Jan Morris book just before she died last year. And my grandad liked historical novels and things about ships, he always wanted to be a journalist and did a bit of writing himself.

My mum loved Middlemarch and Precious Bane when she was younger but all I ever remember her reading when I was growing up was self help books! Even now she doesn't read a lot of fiction, she tends towards the inspiring memoir/new age type of book. My dad's reading tastes are a bit more eclectic, he loves Barbara Pym and Somerset Maugham and has recently been getting into Terry Patchett. His mum (my other granny who died when I was young) was also very found of reading, I know she liked Yeats as I have her copy of his poems.

@MrsTerryPratchett

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.

Please, please Mrs.Pratchett you have upset me. War and Peace is a wonderful book which I first discovered when I read it at the age of 13. The Everyman edition I read then and still have is in three volumes which makes it so easy to read. I had this as a Christmas present (which I had asked for as my literature teacher had said it might well be the greatest work of fiction ever written). The introduction said it would be like climbing a great hill but once at the top you would see a wonderful panorama so I expected a hard read but it is not like that at all. I fell in love with Peter Basoukov and Natasha was so entrancing. Tolstoy’s description of war stays with me to this day and the way that war comes about. I didn’t want this book to end but when it did thank goodness I had Gone With The Wind as another present.

My gran was tiny, just about five foot, and loved to laugh, adored children and handed out hugs as if they were going out of fashion. She loved detective stories. And I don’t mean cozy crimes like Poirot. She loved a book with dismembered corpses described in chilling detail, blood everywhere - the sort of book that when people first talked to her about it you could see them physically recoil in shock, trying to reconcile this little sweet funny lady with gore and death.

I don’t read those.

My Mum loves Tudor historical fiction, classics, any modern good quality fiction, history.

I read exactly the same sort of thing, as does my sister. We often swap book recommendations, but we no longer buy books for each other after too many times getting two copies of the same book for Christmas, because the other two have both seen the same book and thought ‘Oh, she’d love that, I’ll get it for her.” Although my Dad wins that prize. He loves Bernard Cornwall and the last time a new Cornwell book was out just in time for Christmas, Dad got four hardback copies of it.

Having said all that, My gran loved The Shell Seekers. I think because she married a pilot during WW2 and lost him so she read her own story in Penelope’s. There were many Sunday afternoons at her house watching the film with Angela Lansbury! We all have multiple copies of this book, and it is a firm family favourite, because of the association with her.