What are your favourite books?

Do you love reading?

I love reading and I love writing. For me they go hand in hand. I read on average a book a week. Some weeks I may read two or three and then nothing for a week or two. For twenty years, I worked full time as a school principal and was lucky to find time to read a book a month. The last twenty years has been different. In 1999, I gave up full time employment and moved to Bali. Now self employed, I seem to have plenty of time for reading. Maybe my priorities have changed.

Over the years I’ve read a few thousand books. The other day I asked myself, “What are your five all-time-favourite books?” I pondered this question for ages, casting my mind back, remembering, ready to write a list. I scanned my list of read books on Goodreads to prompt my memory. It was a harder task than I expected.

Making the list.

As I made my list, I realised I was actually making two lists. One was a list of my five favourite fiction books and the other a list of my five favourite memoirs. As I played with the titles, more genre types emerged. Travel, gay themed fiction and memoir, my favourite Australian Authors, and Dog books. I stopped myself, scared even more genres would leap out at me. I decided to limit myself to fiction and memoirs for this blog and to save the others for another time. The lists and book covers are shown below.

My 5 favourite fiction books. They are Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatie and To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. They’re not all great examples of fiction and writing, but there is something about each of them that appealed to me.

My 5 favourite memoirs. They are A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani, Sinning Across Spain by Alisa Piper, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes and Lavender and Linen by Henrietta Taylor. Again, I doubt many of these would make it to other people’s lists, but each one was special to me.