In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlyn asks his owl Archimedes, ‘What is your favourite bird?’ ‘Archimedes thought this over for some time, and then said, “Well, it is a large question. It is rather like asking you what is your favourite book.”’
I’ve been reading for six-and-a-half decades. Learnt reading at mum’s knee through a wonderful Lucy Mabel Atwell book. Obviously one cannot talk about all the books one has read. Easiest to talk about the shortest period of one’s life, youth. Post youth I read more and forgot more; did much ‘have-to’ reading; was often bored, memory switched off, leaving clean mental shelves. But in my youth (or yowth), I read for pleasure and remember a great deal, some more vividly than others. Here is why. I think.
1. Readability. Books I read and re-read. P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories; a book about King Arthur and his Knights with Pre-Raphaelite style illustrations (it could have been Andrew Lang’s version; the walls of the Lawrence School library in Sanawar, used to be decorated with identical pictures); Nicholas Stuart Grey’s Over the Hills to Fabylon (great fantasy, great illustrations, great names— Colonel Baldrick, Captain Coriander); Shaw’s plays; later, Hemingway and Graham Greene for their clear prose which paradoxically suggested more than it stated; later still, Patrick Leigh Fermor for his purple prose.
2. The women writers. So much variety, verve, detail, such riveting story telling. George Eliot (Silas Marner. Deeply grateful for this one for I discovered that ‘the Classics’ we were urged to read were not deadly dull. While on classics, I also had crushes on The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and Kenilworth. Not written by women, of course, but still). Rumer Godden (especially The River and In this House of Brede in which a middle aged woman quits a successful corporate career to join a nunnery); Marguerite Patten’s cookery books; Georgette Heyer (been in love with Regency England ever since; the best kind of social history—romantic entanglements enmeshed in Regency language, transport, fashion and history); Enid Blyton (especially The Magic Faraway Tree); Richma Crompton (10-year olds’ friendships, rivalry, engagement with World War II’s German Nasties; William’s money making schemes. A world as alive as Georgette Heyer’s Regency London); Jane Austen (came to her late but was quickly besotted).