Facebook friends have been sharing a list with me of a 100 books that someone somewhere thought we should read. As an addicted reader of approximately 57 years I had read about 87 of them. But the list felt a bit strange, a bit lumpy, a bit white, and can I say it, a bit heterosexual. Series of books were mentioned as one entry on the list, and then a book from the same series as another.

But it set me thinking.

So here is my first attempt at My 100 fave books, to be thought about and completed over the next few weeks. It has had the result of making me look again more closely at the books on my double-stacked bookcases, and also to think how I would categorise my favourite books of all time.

I’m going to go a bit chronological, because the books I’ve read have formed part of my autobiography; they have been absorbed into my blood-stream and consciousness, they have given words to my experiences, and they have developed my language and ideas as I have changed and grown.

So here, as a starter, are the books that have stayed with me from different periods of my early life.

Books from Childhood

• Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
• The Weirdstone of Brisangem by Alan Garner
• The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
• The Future Took Us by David Severn
  

Books from and about Adolescence

• The Catcher in The Rye by J D Salinger
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• There Must Be a Pony by Jim Kirkwood
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
  

Books I read before I went to university

• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• The Prelude by William Wordsworth
• The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
  

Books I read after meeting my great friend Patricia Pitman in 1969

• The Good Companions by J B Priestley
• Bright Day by J B Priestley
• South Riding by Winifred Holtby
• The Diary of a Nobody by Grossmith
• The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
• Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
• Strangers and Brothers by C P Snow
  

Books from my English degree

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens and about another dozen or so to be named.
  

So 25 down and another 75 to go, and I’ve only got up to 1970.

To be continued…..