Books, books, books!

Day Eleven: Favourite Books

I love reading, always have done. I can often be found with my nose in a book. I used to go to the local library every few weeks and I would pick out some new books to read. There is nothing I love more than reading a brand new book, I don’t think that I could ever buy a Kindle to read books on, I like the feeling of reading books too much!

I think that my taste in books has changed as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, some of my favourite books were the ‘Animal Ark’ series. I also loved a book by Rolf Harris which was full of true animal stories, I still read it from time to time now. I was a big ‘Secret Seven’ fan too, I had a badge with SS on it and everything. Books that I never really enjoyed were the ‘Goosebumps’ series, I never understood why they were so popular! They were always the books that had huge waiting lists at the school library.

The Harry Potter series of books would probably be on the favourite book list of anyone my age, and I’m no different. These books really captured my imagination, even if I was a little late to the party! I started reading the books at the end of 1999, start of 2000. I went on holiday the day before the release of The Half Blood Prince, and it was like two weeks of torture, seeing everyone that turned up at the hotel had a copy of the book and I was on a constant Spoiler Alert. Luckily, I managed to evade the spoilers and the book was waiting for me to get back.

For Christmas year before last I got a book, ‘The Butterfly Isles’ which followed journalist Patrick Barkham as he travelled the country over the space of a year to see each species of British Butterfly. The book highlighted the plight of the butterfly. Their habitats are being destroyed to make way for housing developments and climate change is pushing butterflies further and further North as the South becomes warmer. Eventually they will run out of space if more is not done to protect them.

I love a ghost story, especially local ones. The 'Haunted Liverpool' series of books are firm favourites. I enjoy reading them and matching the ghost stories to the places that I’ve been to, even though it was a tad creepy to find multiple stories which took place close to my student house in Liverpool, walks home after a night out were never the same again after reading one story involving the ghost of a hanged man

Something that I now try to do now is read the book before I see the film. It annoys me when people say ‘why bother reading the book when you can just see the film?’ a phrase that I have heard a lot more of since the Harry Potter films came out. The books are a million times better than the films, so many people are missing out on so much of a fantastic story just because they won’t read the book! I don’t think that people read enough.

I’m not a fan of soppy books, I tried to read ‘The Time Travellers Wife’, after reading the blurb I thought that it would be a book that I would love, but I just never got into it, I found the characters unlikeable and the story boring. I can say the same of Nicholas Sparks books and ‘P.S I love you’, but somewhat hypocritically, I love the film. I try to avoid the genre at all costs, but I make an exception for ‘OneDay’, since David Nicholls also wrote ‘Starter for 10’, which is currently one of my favourites.

Currently, I have four books on the go. The first is the ‘Complete Sherlock Holmes’, it’s taking me much longer than I had expected to read. The next is ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, I’m dying to see the film so I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible, but if I’m honest, I don’t really understand what’s going on! Book number three is ‘Elephants on Acid’ which is a book about bizarre science experiments. The final book is ‘Forty Years of Murder’ which is a book written by a home office pathologist.

I have a very long ‘to read list’. I want to read more of the ‘Disc World’ series, so far I have only read one and a half books in the series, so there are plenty more to keep me going! I have ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to read too, I started to read it years ago, but I don’t remember finishing it, so it will be good to read it now that I’m older, I think that I’ll appreciate reading it more.