Part 2 of #Bookaday

Time for the second instalment of my responses to this:

I'd got as far as number 8 last time, so let me think of something film or TV related. Obviously there are masses of books on the shelves that have been made into films or TV series, or indeed vice versa (like some of the early Doctor Who novels). However, the one I'm going to pick is a boxed set of 3 paperbacks from the Michael Palin travel programmes: Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, and Full Circle. The paperbacks don't have all the photos that the big coffee-table versions had, and I probably saw less than half the episodes on TV, but Michael Palin's gentle enthusiasm for foreign parts forms the core of my (very much armchair-based) interest in far-flung places.

Which book reminds me of someone I love? Quicker to list the ones that don't. Among the many given to me by friend T there's Girl With a Pearl Earring, which set me off on Tracy Chevalier. There are the ones that used to belong to my dad's late uncle, unashamedly intellectual with a dreadful line in puns (much like my dad, in fact). The one I'm going with though is a book I've only got an electronic copy of, having first read Big Brother's paperback many years ago: The Condition of the Working Class in England, by Friedrich Engels. Inextricably bound up with Big Brother, his outlook and influence. For better or worse (make your own mind up), he's a big reason I am who I am today.

Ah, the pull of secondhand bookshops. Even now I have to make a big effort to walk past an open charity shop, and I have great memories of exploring the ever-expanding labyrinth of Michael Moon's cornucopia of books in Whitehaven as a child. The majority of my books, and the ones in the Library of Mum and Dad are second hand, many of them with irritatingly limpet-like price stickers from the now defunct Roblyns in Huddersfield, regular haunt of my dad in the late 80s. One wonderful day in the early 90s, friend T and I were taken round every bookshop in some small Pennine town by her dad and had a fab time unearthing treasures. We once had a family day out to the old station bookshop at Alnwick. Can you see why picking one gem might be tricky? How about William Cobbett's Cottage Economy, bought from a second hand bookshop at Pitlochry station moments before our train pulled in?

I'm not sure I always pretended to have read the books I was supposed to read at school, and outside of that the question doesn't make sense so I'll move on to laughter. Humour's a tricky one to pull off, much harder to write than you might think (believe me, I've tried) so I have great respect for those authors who manage it consistently. Do they make me laugh though, really? Is it more of a smile to myself as I pass over the page? Strongest contenders could well be from the likes of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Jasper Fforde or the broader realms of comic fantasy. I've read a lot of comic fantasy (which you might not expect if you came across me in one of my more serious moods), I've written a fair bit too and most of it's not very good. Except All the Room in the World which made it into Bards and Sages Quarterly a few years ago.

Phew, this is getting long so 14 is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 'nuff said. Calvin's dad from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes cartoons gets my vote for top fictional father, though I read the first couple of chapters of Pride and Prejudice a while ago and Mr Bennet's long-suffering wit reminded me of my dad and therefore deserves a mention.

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