#Bookaday, volume the third

I'll make this the last outing for #bookaday and I'll cherry-pick, in a vain attempt to avoid boredom. So, where were we..?

At the risk of sounding pretentious (I know, not like me at all) I can't believe more people haven't read Remembrance of Things Past. Lots of people have heard of Proust, they may even use the word Proustian in relation to sensation-triggered memories, but I've yet to find anyone else who admits to having made it past the first part (if you have, leave a comment and end my solitude). Maybe the fact that I read epic fantasy novels conditioned me for it, but I loved the total immersion and also the ability to (if I remember correctly) write a few thousand pages without actually naming your main character. It's one of the few novels I've read twice (see number 29, below) and it's left such vivid images in my mind that I can step into the setting of the novel at will. Marvellous stuff.

If I say I'm moving on to number 19 now, I guess regulars will groan, and chorus The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. It might get overtaken by The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel at some point, but I haven't finished reading that yet. What can I say? I get fired up about inequality, education, working class opportunities and any mixture thereof.

I've got a lot of out of print books, that's part of the fun of second-hand bookshops.

23 and 25 kind of go hand in hand. Any book we were made to read at school, I'm unlikely to have finished. I definitely didn't finish Jane Eyre, Far From the Madding Crowd or a world war 2 book which may have been The Machine-Gunners by Robert Westall. I vaguely remember asking friend T what happened in The Lord of the Flies so I suspect I didn't get to the end of that one either. I probably finished Animal Farm because it was George Orwell, and I know I read The Hobbit but I'm pretty sure I'd already done so before it was flung at us in the classroom. As you might guess, 23 and 24 are diametrically opposed. Thankfully I was enthused about reading long before school started to try and spoil it, and my earliest memory isn't early enough to capture it (though Spot the Dog will have been part of it, so a brief nod to his creator Eric Hill, who died recently).

Should have sold more copies? Clearly that's The Little Book of Northern Women by JY Saville, a rewarding collection of short stories that's not just for girls, and a snip at only 99p...

I'm not going to admit here which bookload of characters I'd want to be among (although I probably have done already, there's a lot of posts on this blog now). Those who know me, in real life or through long readership, could probably have a good guess. Answers on a postcard (or a comment box, if you feel like it).

Which brings me to re-reading. A few years ago I explained why I rarely re-read books (I do re-read blog posts, and you can do the same here), so I'm not sure there are any books (except children's books, books I've written, or books I've proof-read for other people) that I've read more than twice. Big Brother reads A Christmas Carol every festive season (Dickens and I don't get on, so I had a hard enough time getting through it the once). I know someone who rarely reads anything but Jane Austen and has to buy new copies as the old ones wear out. Honestly, my most-read book is almost certainly A Bear Called Paddington. If you've ever seen me in a situation where a hard stare is called for, that might explain a lot.