Apparently Today Is The Day For This

It's been a little while since I posted on here but apparently; or at least so twitter tells me; it's National Book Lovers Day, so I thought, why not bash something out? For the larks, as it were. And for better or worse, I actually followed through. So here you are...

Reading has been my thing for as far back as I can recall. I taught myself to read at a tender age simply to have something to do in the 'children should be seen and not heard and not even that if we can manage it' atmosphere of neglect I grew up in, so by the time I was at school I was a bit of a headache for my teachers who didn't really know what to do with me while they were teaching the other kids to do what was already second nature to me. So they complained to my parents then made me do the lessons anyway.

Being forced to sit in class and recite The Cat On The Mat and Spot Has A Ball and other suchlikes couldn't derail what had by the age of 8 or 9 become essentially my only source of pleasure. But it certainly didn't help. The person who did help, was my Year 6 teacher, who did me the solid of excluding me from reading circle and giving me a copy of Call Of The Wild to pass the time. The man had his faults, but I'll love him until I die for that.

Pretty much the only time I ever truly found my love of books waning was during my Secondary education and it was English Lit class that did it.

I could live with being told I had to read something. I could even live with the fact that 90% of what I was being told I had to read was antiquated garbage in which I and my classmates had zero interest and which was only on the curriculum because it had always been on the curriculum and the people who made the decisions about that kind of thing were terrified of accusations of dumbing down if they removed it.

The problems started with the dictated pace. Read chapters 2 and 3 they'd say. But what if chapter 3 ended on a really exciting bit and you wanted to know what happened next? Nope, stop at the end of chapter 3, thank you very much. That problem was easily solved of course by simply ignoring it. On the rare occasions that we were given a book that actually got it's hooks into me, I'd have the whole thing read by the second lesson and damn the consequences. To Kill A Mockingbird, I'm looking at you. A problem less easy to solve was what came next. The analysis. AKA, talking about the book.

I could write an essay just fine, but I begrudged it. I've always hated the 'what was the author trying to say here?' and 'what are the thematical themey themes in this relationship?' discussion points, because they always come with that nagging underlying implication that there are correct answers and I'm of the school of thought that says that what the book is about is whatever you think it's about, authorial intent be damned. I mean, why would you want to tell someone that a book which had made them feel something had made them feel the wrong something and they should read this paragraph again and DO YOU SEE NOW? But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I could write essays passingly well. What made me dread the thought of opening a book was the dreaded, but inevitable GROUP DISCUSSION and the equally inevitable and even more dreaded FUN LITTLE ROLE PLAY EXERCISE. For someone as introverted and, let's face it, pathologically shy as myself those classes were absolute mental torture. I wouldn't sleep the night before, I'd have panic attacks in the toilets before the bell... it was all I could do to quell tears on more than one occasion. So yes, English Lit. was a killer for me.

But then I quit full time education and got a full time menial job that I'm still stuck in to this day so jokes on you Teacher Who Made Me Pretend To be Eric Birling And Answer Questions From The Class About A Girl I Knew Once.

 It took a little while, but once I got over the fear of someone pouncing on me on the bus screaming about the homosexual subtext in Patriot Games or the obvious Vietnam War parallels in The Naughtiest Girl In The School, I dared to read again. And I've never stopped.

So, with that incredibly long brief introduction to me and my relationship with books, let's get on to what I came here for. To tell you my favourites! Except these aren't my favourites so much as the ones I've been thinking about lately that I really like. Ask me again in a week and I'd probably knock up a totally different list. Apart from the first one. Obviously.

So in the unlikely event that anyone values my opinion about this stuff;I'm under no illusions; here goes...

The Borribles - Michael de Larrabeiti

Well duh. Anyone who knows me at all will tell you that The Borribles is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of YA; although it wasn't called that at the time; ever written. Beautifully drawn characters that you love from the moment you meet them, thrilling adventure stories with some very, very, dark undertones and a pair of grotesques as the series villains that wouldn't have looked out of place on the streets of Royston Vasey. Oh, and the ending will break your heart.

The Naughtiest Girl In The School - Enid Blyton

AKA, Hey Everyone, Isn't Communism Smashing?

I can't help it, I loved this book when I first read it and the heroine became my heroine instantly. Of course she realises the error of her ways and conforms by the end of the book because what else was going to happen in a book about adolescent rebellion in the 1940's, but while it lasted her efforts to rail against what she saw as an unjust system; and she wasn't wrong damn it; had me cheering her on with a song in my heart.

I never read the sequels. I couldn't bear to see her brought any lower.

Their Masters War - Mick Farren

A society of 'primitives' make a pilgrimage to sacrifice some of their own to their Gods. The Gods turn out to be recruiting said sacrifices for an intergalactic war. Cue all guns blazing military space opera. With semi sentient symbiotic living uniforms that could, if you asked really nicely, be persuaded to give you an orgasm. Heady stuff for a 10 year old. No idea if it's actually any good but I loved it as a kid. And not just for the trousers that could perform fellatio. I barely knew what fellatio was. Even now it's something of an abstract concept.

2000AD - Various

Not strictly speaking a book but the first comic I ever read regularly and the last man standing in the grim war of attrition that was the British Comic Industry of the 20th century.There are some whippersnappers on the shelves today, but 2000AD is the proud veteran, still showing the new recruits how it's done.

2000AD has been in (almost) continuous weekly publication for close to 40 years at this point so it has quite the back catalogue. Luckily it's current publisher has a quite frankly superb line of graphic novels collecting pretty much everything so there's something for everyone out there.

AND that's your whack. I mean I could go on; The 5th Wave and it's sequels are apocalyptic YA sci-fi to die for with one of my favourite heroines in years; I'm a few books behind in my reading of Zoe Marriot's back catalogue but she's getting better by the book (and her debut was no slouch); Diana Gabaldon is in dire need of an editor and her sexual politics are a bit iffy but aside from that she writes rollicking good historical adventure stories; Robert Rankin and his Far Fetched Fiction never fails to make me positively guffaw, to the point that I now refuse to read him in public...you get the idea. Better to stop now or I'll still be typing this time next National Book Lovers Day.