I thought it would be interesting to list my 50 favourite books. I have no idea what it might say about me other than I read a lot and like escapist literature. It took a week to edit it down and I just picked the ones I could likely quote backwards. They are in no particular order other than most memorable.
1. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
2. Maidens Trip – Emma Smith
3. A Crisis of Brilliance – David Haycock
4. Evolution in Modern Art – Frank Rutter
5. Alone in Berlin – Hans Fallada
6. Pictures from Persia – Cecil Keeling
7. The Pale Horse – Agatha Christie
8. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
9. Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
10. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers.
11. Full Tilt – Dervla Murphy
12. Bicycle Diaries – David Byrne
13. The Painted Veil – Somerset Maugham
14. Lost Horizon – James Hilton
15. The Horse and His Boy – C S Lewis
16. Few Eggs and No Oranges – Vere Hodgson
17. The Happy Prince – Oscar Wilde
18. Dreaming of Babylon – Richard Brautigan
19. Empty World – John Christopher
20. The Tripods Trilogy – John Christopher
21. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
22. Witches Abroad – Terry Pratchett
23. Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
24. His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman
25. The Tempest – William Shakespeare
26. Vanity Fair – William Thakery
27. Mr Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood
28. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
29. The Wasteland – T.S. Eliot
30. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
31. Fatherland – Robert Harris
32. On The Beach – Nevil Shute
33. The Doomed Oasis – Hammond Innes
34. The Story of the Amulet – E. Nesbit
35. The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
36. The Hound of the Baskervilles – A. Conan Doyle
37. The Temple – Stephen Spender
38. The House at Pooh Corner – A.A. Milne
39. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
40. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
41. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkein
42. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
43. The Wench is Dead – Colin Dexter
44. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
45. Summoned by Bells – John Betjeman
46. A Clergyman’s Daughter – George Orwell
47. The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
48. Unnatural Death – Dorothy L Sayers
49. Smiley’s People – John le Carre
50. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol