First, a confession: I have a
kindle and so many of the books I have been reading recently are stored on
there, which is frankly a relief, because my loft is groaning with books and
there isn’t any more room on my bookshelves.
On my kindle I have an awful lot
of YA, including such excellent books as AE Rought’s Broken, Kresley Cole’s
Poison Princess (I can’t wait for the sequel), Maggie Steifvater’s entire
oeuvre, Ilsa Blick’s Ashes, Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood, Meyer’s Cinder,
White’s Paranormalcy series, Lou Morgan’s Blood and Feathers, Ash, Divergent,
The Daughter of Smoke and Bone and so on.
Being a typical girl, I have also
loaded my kindle up with ‘naughty books’ that Andy (my husband) doesn’t know
about. Ilona Andrews (her Edge books are
brilliant), JR Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood), Jennifer Estep (Assassin), Gena
Showalter (Lords of the Underworld): my guilty pleasures.
But you don’t want to hear about
my kindle here. You want to know about
my bookshelves. My main shelves are in
the study, which we recently renovated.
They are from Ikea. I love them.
Periodically they rotate. Some of the books on my shelves go up to the
loft and some in the loft come down.
Currently my loft contains a lot of science fiction and fantasy: David Gemmell,
Stephen King, Tad Williams, George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, Simmons, Baxter,
Asimov.
The bookshelves in the study have
a core of texts that don’t change. These
are my reference books, my favourites, my old friends. As you can see, they also include my Leeds
Book Award (I had to put it up high as it is made of glass and the four year
old was showing a worrying interest in playing with it). There’s no real system. I’ve got TS Eliot next to Beowulf, Tolkien
next to the family Bible, Malory beside an old edition of Jane Eyre, the Love
Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning beside an old book of Irish Poetry and an
A-Z of London. I have Ted Hughes Tales From Ovid next to
Edmund Spencer’s Faery Queen and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Angel’s Fury (my first book) is up there
somewhere too.
Beside that shelf I have this
one. I have allowed my husband a bit of
space here, so you’ll find some maths text books and Cryptic Crosswords on the
bottom, covering up Umberto Eco and friends.
Above it are more favourites, Don Juan, The Color Purple, The End of Mr
Y, The Good Soldier, Margaret Atwood, Iain M Banks, Jonathan Strange and Mr
Norrell, a few ‘Chinese’ books – The Tale of Murasaki, The Book of Loss and so
on.
On the other side, behind closed
doors … the start of my naughty pleasures collection, pre-kindle: Shannon
McKenna, Lori Foster, Jenny Crusie (Welcome to Temptation, Faking it and Bet me
are big favourites). Also my more
organised ‘Author collections’: so all of my Janet Evanovich (I love her
Stephanie Plum books, although I feel that she has now jumped the shark, so I
stopped at 16), all the Kelley Armstrong books (from Bitten to 13), everything
Terry Pratchett has written (I’m am such a huge fan) and all of Anne
Macaffrey’s books (again I’m a huge PERN and Brawn and Brainship fan – between
them Macaffrey, Gemmell and Stephen King were my biggest reasons for writing).
In the hallway outside the
children’s rooms sits my YA bookcase. It is packed full (doubled up on all the
shelves) and contains some real favourites such as Eoin Colfer, Garth Nix, Tom
Pollock, Sarwat Chadda, Gillian Philip, Kathleen Duey, Julie Bertagna and there
are even a few Enid Blyton in there …
The children each have a bookcase
in their room although my daughter’s actually tend to be all over her floor
(I’d like to yell at her and make her clean her room, but I seem to recall my
own room being similarly carpeted when I was a child and don’t feel that I have
a leg to stand on). She likes Rainbow
Magic (although is finally growing out of these!), Ottoline, Mr Gum, Lemony
Snicket, Dick King Smith, non-fiction books about anything.
My son has a bookcase full to
bursting with picture books. He has
loads about bears from his ‘bear phase’ when he was two and everything had to
be about bears. Now he is into dinosaurs
(Captain Flynn and the Pirate Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Cruncher etc), pirates (The
pirates next door) and superheroes (Chabon’s Awesome Man, DC Superheroes
etc). He also inherited quite a few from
Maisie, so we have an awful lot of the wonderful Julia Donaldson and lovely
books like Guess How Much I Love You, No Matter What and various things about
princesses. He is also starting to read
himself, so a few early reader books are creeping in.
Some of the picture books are my
real favourite too, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, The Beasties and so
on.
I could go on all day, but you
don’t want that. You have lives and
books of your own to get back to.
So you can see my shelves are as
eclectic as I am, a bit dark, a bit poetic, a bit nostalgic, a bit funny. This has been a really fun post, poking
around those shelves. I think I’m off to
pick a few to put by my bed for later.
Goodbye kindle.
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