40 Years of Reading
By my calculations (which are always questionable…), considering that I generally finish a novel or book within 48 hours, in my 40 years of life I should have been able to have read nearly 3,500 titles in my time. Well, that hasn’t happened…
My favourite authors are Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Irving, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Saul, Mitch Albom and Salman Rushdie. I should most probably add Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and Terry Pratchett to that line up too. “Favourite” meaning that these authors have been consistently on my reading lists over the years.
I’ll read anything (I have the same approach to food) but particularly enjoy Fiction (Horror especially), History & Ancient Civilisations, Politics and deep thought-provoking content.
I do not enjoy Patricia Cornwell, Ayn Rand and James Patterson. I also have no intention of ever reading The Secret (Rhonda Byrne), Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) and The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) and anything by Danielle Steel. And I will never read Dan Brown again unless I turn senile and regress to basic comprehension of garbled verbage.
John Grisham is good for lawyers who want to read about lawyers…
While I’m at it; could someone confirm for me whether Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult are not in fact one and the same person?
If you can tell a good story then I’ll keep turning the page – no matter the topic.
My Top 40 Reads to 40
In no particular order:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Needful Things by Stephen King
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Behavior of Moths by Poppy Adams
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Watership Down by Richard Adams
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
The God Project by John Saul
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
The Shack by William P. Young
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Everything by Roald Dahl
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Everything by Dr Seuss
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The entire Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Beloved by Toni Morrison, United States
The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
I’ve written up detailed reviews of many of the books on this list on my Pinterest board called “Books I’ve Read“.
How does your reading list compare? Let me know.
Comments