The first book I remember buying is Norse Gods & Heroes…

My birthday money trophy was packed with gripping tales of fire stolen, revenge wreaked, eagles and gory entrails. It stoked my proto-gothic imagination and left me with an enduring interest in vengeful family sagas and ancient mythology. By adolescence, I was into Dune, the Aeneid and I, Claudius. I’ve always been an avid reader.

It is hard to imagine, now, how deprived girls and young women were of convincing female protagonists before the Virago and Women’s Press lists arrived in the 70’s and 80’s. Those green-edged covers, each announcing another rediscovered, neglected classic, were a fictional coming of age for my generation. Antonia Shimerdas, Olivia Curtis and Frankie Addams were my collective Holden Caulfield. For years, I read little else but female authors.

A decade on and I’d worked hard to restore the gender balance. These days, I like a mixture of writers, male and female. Here are some of my favourites :

As I Lay Dying, Atomised, Blonde, Beloved, The Catcher in the Rye, Raymond Chandler, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Earth to Earth by John Cornwell, Derek Jarman’s ‘The Garden’, The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid’s Tale, Ice by Anna Kavan, The Member of the Wedding, My Antonia, The New York Trilogy, Palimpset, To the Lighthouse, the VI Warshawski novels, Voss, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Some of these books I return to time and again, a couple are comfort reads, tinged with a little guilt, like chocolate biscuits: Gone with the Wind, the Mapp and Lucia series, Peyton Place and Pride and Prejudice.

And what about poetry? I regularly revisit Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, A.E Housman, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Louis MacNeice, Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Shelley and Stevie Smith.

Book Review Pages: For the last eighteen months I’ve been reading with a purpose beyond pleasure and entertainment. Books on the craft of writing have alternated with my local Book Club list and other fiction squeezed between.

The titles reviewed here reflect a fairly eclectic mix - my ongoing reading diary - but, hell, after fortywhatever years of reading, I think I can afford to cut myself a little slack…

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