In the Mood (Part one)

I love reading, I can’t remember not being able to read.  My way home from infant school was past the library and we would regularly call in there to change our library books.  I finished all the set reading books in school and was reading library books in the reading time there.  I always had my nose in a book – and when I couldn’t read at meal times i would read the ingredients on the sauce bottle.  I read Enid Blyton books, then I started reading horse and pony books - I would have loved to have my own pony, but a sweetie shop on the main road wasn’t the best place to keep a pony.  We had moved during the summer between infant and junior school so I started school in a new town.  I was most upset that they wanted me to go back to the school reading books – I tried to explain to them that I had already read all the ones that they had.   I was going to the library two or three times each week now and getting my dad’s books for him as well as my own.  I started reading school stories, I read the Just William books, the Susan books by Jane Shaw.  I read the Katy books and Anne of Green Gables.  We started reading African Adventure by Willard Price – a chapter a week was too slow for me, I wanted to know what happened next, so I got that book from the library and read it and most of the other ones in that series too. 
I can’t remember all the books  that we read in secondary school, I do remember the English teacher giving us a list of books that he thought we ought to read, and encouraged us to read as many of them as we could.  I read Animal Farm, and several by John Wyndham.  I read a lot of science fiction books during those years plus Agatha Christie and other crime novels.  I never managed to read a book by Charles Dickens all the way through – and I still haven’t.  We read To Kill a Mockingbird for “O” level – fortunately we read that the year before the exam, because in that last year our English teacher left & I didn’t get along with the new teacher at all.  In that year we read almost nothing but poetry, I hated every minute of those classes, & I still don’t read poetry now. 
When I was seventeen my Christmas present was a 3 book set of Lord of the Rings.  I still have those books today, they are battered and dropping to pieces but well read.  My nephew still jokes that it must be time for my annual re-read. 
I read Catherine Cookson – eventually finding that the books were “samey” so much that I didn’t want to read any more.  I still haven’t got back into reading those or similar style books.  
I discovered Terry Pratchett and David Eddings and started reading more fantasy books  – although I still haven’t read any of Anne McCaffrey’s books.  I read Harry Potter (encouraged by my nephew) and added Ellis Peters, Mary Stewart, Stephen Donaldson, Terry Brooks, Martha Grimes, Anne Perry, Paul Doherty, Dorothy Dunnett, Philip Jose Farmer, Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Julian May to my list of authors read.  I read Clan of the Cave Bear and the next four books in that series, I re-read some of the books that my English teacher had recommended - books by Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.  I read Georgette Heyer and Robert Neill, Barbara Erskine and Dennis Wheatley, Anne Rice and Umberto Eco, the Dragon books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Robin Hobb and Winston Graham, Ngaio Marsh and Sophie Kinsella, Peter Tremayne and Lilian Jackson Braun, Dorothy Cannell and Kim Stanley Robinson and plenty more that I can't bring to mind at the moment.

Then I got my kindle……………………..

to be continued