sixth.edition

1. Margaret Mahy - The Changeover

At the age of 14, I found it difficult to relate to most of the books I was reading. The Young Adult books I read depicted a teenage life filled with drugs, teenage pregnancies and parents divorcing. Huh? When I picked up Mahy's
book, I suddenly found a heroine with which I could identify - Laura Chant was strong, stubborn and a touch apart from everybody else - and the plot was filled with supernatural elements, an interesting backdrop (New Zealand!) and this mysterious, bookish, dysfunctional guy Sorenson Carlisle who quoted Lewis Carroll and read Regency romances in order to connect with his mother. I kept borrowing this book from the local library and eventually ended up buying it in English as soon as I got to London. Not only did it spawned a lifelong fascination with New Zealand - and I simply had to photograph the road sign saying "Paraparaumu 3 miles" when I was in NZ - and not only did it land me a lifelong crush on Sorry Carlisle, but it also injected a lifelong love for books that mix realism and supernatural elements seamlessly. I still re-read The Changeover every summer and force friends to read it too.

2. C.S. Lewis - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
I loved the Narnia series - apart from The Magician's Nephew and that one about the horse and the boy. I loved the talking animals, the scary monsters and the fearless children. It was not until I reached adulthood that I looked back and realised it was all a Christian allegory with a demeaning view of women. But the Narnia series brought me to the Dragonlance series (oh, Raistlin!) and, of course, to Tolkien. Furthermore, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe gave me all the wonderfully geeky friends I have nowadays: immersed in fantasy novels, I began throwing polygon dice and met lots of great people - and I probably would never have read a single Choose Your Own Adventure.. book or read any Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula LeGuin, or Marion Zimmer Bradley, if it hadn't been for C.S. Lewis.

3. Johan Fjord Jensen - Den Ny Kritik
An 1960s Danish book on New Criticism. I picked it up for 50p at a book fair and, by chance, this book became my introduction to literary theory as a whole. I remember sitting outside in the summer of 1996 and not understanding a word, only to pick it up three months later and thinking it all terribly lucid. It is not all that informative, well-written or anything, but it became my gateway into the insane (and somewhat inane) world of textual materiality, reader-response theory, decentralised structures and all that jazz.

4. Jacob Korg - Language in Modern Literature: Innovation & Experiment

The first I read which emphasised how language shapes our way of perceiving meaning and how modernist literature experimented with language forms and usage in order to depict the Modern World. It sounds so basic now that I'm typing this, but this book was a real eye-opener for me. I even tried to track down a used copy so I could own it. Alas.

5. John Baxter - A Pound of Paper
I bought this a few weeks ago, but it transformed my world in a few hundred pages. It is the memoir of a book collector and is filled with anecdotes about dust jackets, first editions and fellow book junkies. Reading it was like discovering that place for which you never knew you had been searching. Suddenly everything made sense and I immediately logged on to eBay to search for those hardback editions. I also looked at my bookshelves and decided what books would form the backbone of my collection and what books I could discard without a pang in my heart.

6. E.M. Forster - A Room With A View
The first real book I ever read in English - that is, it was not abridged, made easier to read for 'learners' or anything. It was the first 'straight into the vein' book in English I read and I remember savouring every single word. I had already seen the film several times, but nothing could match the actual prose (thus this book also launched my 'No, I haven't seen the film, but I've read the book' quirk). Nowadays Forster's prose does not strike me as particularly lyrical, but I loved his sentence structure and use of words before I could
name what it was I loved. A Room With A View led me to read Forster's Maurice (which led to those other things which for several reasons we shall not mention, to paraphrase Rufus Wainwright), but much more importantly it made me read as many books in English as I could possibly find. And that led to a University degree in English.

7. Shane Weller (ed.) - Great Love Poems
It is a thin volume - 113 pages, actually - issued by Dover Publications, which prints very cheap paperback editions of great literature. I bought this anthology for 95p in 1992 and it was my introduction to English poetry. It has all the classic stuff: Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, John Donne, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron etc. And where did that led me? Well, I'm a bonafide poetry nut nowadays and know most of the poems contained in this anthology by heart. If there was a fire and I could only rescue one book, I'd go for this one although it is a cheesy paperback with modernised spelling. After all, this book features my teenaged self's handwritten notations to my favourite poems and I'm pleased to see that I still love the same poems that I did more than a decade ago.

8. Dorothy L. Sayers - Murder Must Advertise

I don't know about you, but I'm surrounded by Sherlock Holmes fans (not to mention a few Miss Marple devotees) and I've always been much fonder of Lord Peter Wimsey, his beloved Harriet and the unflappable butler Bunter. I'm not sure, but I think that reading Dorothy L. Sayers started my lifelong love of Chesterfield sofas, cricket-playing men and women sipping lemonade. All that pre-Great War gentility stuff mixed with a good dash of murderous intent and Donne-quoting men with stiff upper lips. Every year I dress up in Laura Ashley-esque clothes and sell home produce at the Anglican church fete - and I fully blame Sayers for enjoying myself so much.