I loved this. So many addicts confessing! I´m tempted to add my own reading history in the back.

Particularly read: Jeanette Winterson and Timberlake Wertenbaker (one thing I regret is that the paper is so lovely, I haven´t dog-eared or marked my favourite passages as is my custom. Oh, come on, don´t gasp! Books are alive! They grow with annotation). Anyway, definitely worth getting your hands on. ( )

really disappointing (after the great cover) ( )

I loved this. So many addicts confessing! I´m tempted to add my own reading history in the back.

Particularly read: Jeanette Winterson and Timberlake Wertenbaker (one thing I regret is that the paper is so lovely, I haven´t dog-eared or marked my favourite passages as is my custom. Oh, come on, don´t gasp! Books are alive! They grow with annotation). Anyway, definitely worth getting your hands on. ( )

this book has made me think about my first books. we had no money to buy books, my parents had no books, and i had never heard of a public library until i was 6 and lived in ottawa. the years that my mother(never my father) read to me, we lived in england after the war on an airbase and life was hard. i remember noddy and rupert, both left behind when we came to canada and a big red compilation which came to canada and had augustus was a chubby lad, fat ruddy cheeks augustus had. that's all i can remember.
when we lived in ottawa we had more money, so i was bought thorton w. wilder-chatty the red squirrel-, the bobbsey twins, and my grandmother sent me girl every week. i loved girl until she died in 1963. i never lived near a library but my father used to drive me twice a week in the holidays in 62,63,64.
where did these authors get all these books????? ( )

It took me a long time to finish this, but it's a really nice book to dip into in between reading other things. It is a collection of short pieces by famous writers - maybe four or five pages each - reminiscing about their childhood reading, musing on the place books have in their lives, and discussing what they read nowadays. Some of the writers have added a 'top ten' list of their favourite books to the end of their pieces, and each author has been allocated an illustrator, giving a varied and colourful flavour to the pages.

With the exception of a couple of duds - including, to my surprise, Alan Hollinghurst - it's a lovely ensemble piece, bringing back memories of my own childhood reading: how I read, what I read and how different books floated into my life. I had to read it with a piece of paper and a pen next to me because there were so many books I wanted to chase up, old favourites and as yet unread masterpieces, having heard them praised so highly.

Although the book is quite old - the youngest author is Jeanette Winterson - I might get myself a copy (I read it from the library) because the themes and many of the books are so timeless and universal that they'll always ring true. ( )