the heart of books

       I just realised that Facebook had this really cute function of searching for your favourite books and liking them. In a way, it's all very silly, but I enjoyed looking at the various book covers and thinking about which books still spoke to me. I've read many many many excellent books, but I don't think excellence is the criteria when we think about books that have impacted our lives, whose words capture the very moments we live and become part of our lives.

      Presently, the ten (english) books that mean the most to me would be (in no order of merit):

      1) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
      2)  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
      3)  Master Harold and The Boys (play) by Athol Fugard
      4)  His Dark Materials (trilogy) by Philip Pullman
      5) The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
      6) The Devotion of Suspect X by Keiko Higashi
      7) The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
      8) Long Day's Journey into Night (play) by Eugene O'Neil
      9) South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
     10) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

   I had to leave three other heart books out: (i) The Plague by Albert Camus, (ii) Eating Fire by Margaret Atwood and (iii) The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein.

   No. 1 is the book I'll read for life and the one I'll carry if I can only have one book on a deserted island. No. 2 is the book I read when I was seventeen, which is the perfect age to read it, on the cusp of adulthood and brimming with the potential loss of innocence. No. 3 is the play that gives me this beautiful image to hold onto in my darkest moments. No. 4 is the book that taught me about heartbreak when I was a child. No. 5 is my idea of the perfect novel. No. 6 is how I want to write. No. 7 is how I used to want to write and the one book where my closest friends have told me that I was like the main character (who I think is crazy, romantic, creative, narcissistic and dreamy). No. 8 is my idea of the perfect play. No. 9 is the first book I read from Murakami and sometimes, how I see the world. No. 10 is still my greatest reading pleasure.

    [(i) is the book that captured me in the moment where I missed ZM the most, (ii) is my poetic aspirations and (iii) is the book that made me believed that magic lies in the goodness of people].

    Oh, the lives lived in books! The happy endings, the sad endings, so much of life is in the lives we will never live.