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Jan 30, 2007
About My Library
My [arbitrary, fluid] List of [around] Top Twenty Favourite Works of Fiction

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Legend - David Gemmell
The Waiting Game - Bernice Rubens
The Dark Tower series - Stephen King
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Cider House Rules - John Irving
Nobody's Fool - Richard Russo
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Revelation - C. J. Sansom
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
The Chrysalids - John Wyndham
Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
We Need to Talk about Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Florence and Giles - John Harding
Wastelands - John Joseph Adams (Editor)
About Me
A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us - Franz Kafka

There's nothing I don't love about books. I love the comforting excitement of a bookshop, hands darting here and there among the spines, like a fish in a coral reef, the chance to surreptitiously eye other people's choices for something undiscovered, the simple act of standing amidst so many books a sheer privilege.

I love the names of publishers. I run my eye along the bookshelf; Hodder and Stoughton, Abacus, Picador, Penguin, Bantam, Harper Collins, Vintage. I imagine them as cathedrals dedicated to the discovery of great writing, their founders and employees as literary bloodhounds and guardians. I love illustrated plates and photographs, diagrams, line drawings, typography, and what they do to the atmosphere of a book. I love graphic novels and well-illustrated children's books. Most of them are so strange.

I love the solid feel of a book in my hands, and the pliability of those soft paperbacks that don't crease along the spine. I love book covers; vivid, contemporary, eye-catching, sleek and formal, and fine-bound rarities made to hold and touch before opening. A book cover can be an enigmatic clue or an abstract imagery to the contents, or a story unto itself. I love book titles, flash-fire summaries of an entire work; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Sound and the Fury, This Book is Full of Spiders. I love reading blurbs, recommendations, reviews, first lines, weighing up whether this or that one is my next choice. I love grabbing them wholesale and taking home a stack; acquiring and shelving and owning them. When I run out of money, I fill my online basket and wish-lists with titles that I might never see in real life.

I love second-hand books that have belonged to other people for a time and then found their way to me. I like notations and underlinings (though I won't do that myself) and lightly worn edges. You can wonder where a book has been and then discover where it took its last reader. I like quotes and fan-fiction, I like the connection you get with someone when you've read the same story, even when you've both taken away something entirely different. I love that complete strangers can share imaginary worlds with one another.

I love bookmarks; little strips of artwork, old receipts, theatre tickets, corners of envelopes, post-it notes, leaflets touting their cause or propaganda silently to the pages they're stuck between. I love bookshelves; giant furniture built to house dreams and knowledge. Even the most cobbled-together plank-and-brick affair becomes beautiful when charged with lines of books. I like seeing untidy piles in unlikely places, and I want to know, down to the last title, what books are in the stack by your bed.

Above all, I love reading... picking up a book and immersing myself in a world, a place and time that exists purely because of marks on a page. I love learning and imagining, in equal measure. I love playful authors who enjoy using words, and smart authors who make words work hard, and inspired authors who transmute words into pure story. I love knowing the authors who will write what I want to read before I pick up their next book, and new, untried authors, whose voice I haven't heard yet. I love how your relationship with a book can last a lifetime or the ten minutes it takes you to put it down in disgust. I love being gone from the moment I open the cover, to putting the book down in astonishment or sorrow or transported delight. I love how books can get you through the worst times in your life by giving you somewhere else to be for an hour, or a day.

I love how you are never alone in a book.
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