“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” Marcel Proust

Nooj, excuse my tardiness. It’s not quite a list of my favourites as much as the twenty most memorable books I’ve read:

1. The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
3. The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
5. Sula by Toni Morissen
6. Ake by Wole Soyinka
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (not my favourite Auestenian but one of those books that come to define you)
8. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (by far, Austen’s masterpiece)
9. Persuasion (personal resonance)
10. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte (Shatteringly beautiful descriptions and high scores on personal resonance)
11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
12. County of my Skull by Antjie Krog (No South African can understand what this country is about without reading this)
13. Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon (A brilliant book on everything from literary theory, love and Jane Austen)
14. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (Holden Caulfield is a hero)
15. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (Beautifully written)
16. For whom the bell tolls by Ernest Hemingway (I was twelve when I first read it, not exactly appropriate reading but it taught me what fascism is and moleskin or not, Hemingway was a sexist despot wielding a well attuned pen)
17. The journals of Sylvia Plath (My hero)
18. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton (Quintessentially South African, schmaltzy liberalism yes, but as a window into another time it’s precious)
19. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Another novel I may have read too young, West Egg, East Egg. Good times)
20. You just don’t understand by Deborah Tannen

    It’s quite jarring to realise how much there still is to read.