Books marked with an asterisk (*) are Joanna’s ALL-TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS.
Joanna’s favourite books in life. A reminiscence, to remind me of the books that I’ve found very good and been privileged to have the opportunity to read while growing up; which entertained me, accompanied me, disciplined me and played a part in making me into what I am.
* * *
“Books…are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ‘em, then we grow out of ‘em and leave ‘em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.” – Lord Peter Wimsey
25 years old seems like a good time to review the lobster shells and look back on the activity that I once spent the bulk of my life on: READING…
The numbered list is a list of the books that stand out from all the books I’ve read simply because they agree with me very well. The fun books, the moving books, the rollicking and swashbuckling, fast-paced and witty books that I could read again and again. This list does not include all the “good literature” I’ve read as part of a healthy, balanced diet… such as the fresh bread of Charles Dickens, the bleak oats of Thomas Hardy, the morass of porridge of Austen (yes, I never learnt to appreciate Austen despite liking the movie “The Jane Austen Book Club”) and the brown rice of Dostoyevsky. These books are more like the yummy ginger chicken soup, mee swa and taugeh that I like with some snacks like fishballs, wasabi peas and bak kwa thrown in… Mmmm! Some of them have shaped my life more than others.
The unnumbered books (in brackets) are books which still stand out for me as well from all the others I’ve read in my life, whether because I liked or disliked them (liked more than disliked) – but in my opinion all are good books. I may or may not have enjoyed them just as much as the numbered books (which are the most ‘special’ ones, but many of the unnumbered ones are special too).
The Formative Years
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” – CS Lewis
1. Peter Pan — JM Barrie
2. The Jungle Books* / Kim — Rudyard Kipling
3. Narnia series — CS Lewis
4. The Scarlet Pimpernel — Baroness Orczy
5. The White Rabbit — Bruce Marshall (non-fiction; WWII)
6. Les Miserables* / Notre Dame de Paris — Victor Hugo
7. Biggles series* — WE Johns
8. The Neverending Story* / Momo* – Michael Ende
9. The Outsiders* — SE Hinton
10. White Fang / The Call of the Wild — Jack London
(Other things memorable during this period: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett – I liked the descriptions of food; A Wrinkle In Time series by Madeleine L’Engle, Roald Dahl, Dick King-Smith, 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, a few of The Chalet School series, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the Oz series, the Joan Aiken series, the Mrs Frisby series, O. Henry and Saki, Howard Pyle and Roger Lancelyn Green, An Elephant for Muthu by Carolyn Sloan which was the first book to ever make me cry, at age eight. And I loved Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers ['The Mystery Of...'] and Malory Towers / St Clare’s series. I also liked The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbitt and Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson. Edgar Allan Poe was also memorable for his horrible creepy stories. I still feel very freaked out when I think about ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.. Eee!)
* * *
The Exploratory Years
“There is no land uninhabitable nor sea innavigable”! – Robert Thorne; quoted by Lymond and Wimsey (as Ling first pointed out)
11. Le Morte d’Arthur* — Sir Thomas Malory
12. X-Wing series* — Michael A. Stackpole / Aaron Allston ESPECIALLY Starfighters of Adumar (I LOVE IT.. oh, DEFINITELY bak kwa, definitely comfort food)
13. The Once And Future King* — TH White
14. Watership Down* / The Plague Dogs — Richard Adams
15. Possession — AS Byatt
16. The Lymond Chronicles — Dorothy Dunnett
17. Oscar and Lucinda* — Peter Carey
18. The Book of Sorrows — Walter Wangerin Jr (This has the distinction of being the only other book that has ever made me cry after An Elephant for Muthu)
19. The Peter Wimsey series* — Dorothy L. Sayers, ESPECIALLY Gaudy Night (I LOVE IT)
20. The Man Who Was Thursday* / The Napoleon of Notting Hill / Father Brown series — GK Chesterton
(Many things were memorable during this period for both good and depressing reasons: Ivanhoe and Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, James Herriot and Gerald Durrell, PG Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham’s short stories, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Katherine Neville’s The Eight, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Gaiman/Prachett’s Good Omens, Carey’s Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Irving’s World According to Garp, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Beaumarchais and Moliere, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Voltaire’s Candide, Petronius [I read this at age 13. Don't ask.. ok fine this was entirely Peter Wimsey's fault for having mentioned him], Glyn Maxwell’s Last Crossing of Isolde, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers, some Dickens, some Hardy, some Chaucer, some Bronte sisters, Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution epic A Place Of Greater Safety. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings… it was such a chore to wade through the descriptions though… I waded through Dante Alighieri’s Inferno age 14 but I think I was too young to appreciate it. Not to mention my big medieval swashbuckling phase: the Mabinogion, the Nibelungenlied, lots of Arthurian stuff which would be a list in itself, El Cid, the Chanson de Roland,
etc… The White Goddess by Robert Graves.. a radical and inflammatory poetic manifesto which caused me to quit studying literature. As you can see I was completely overstimulated during my teenage years. I might have read all that stuff but I probably didn’t really “get” most of the scholarly aspect of it. I got a lot of fun though – it was indeed a golden age of exploring uncharted territory, an explosion of reading and discovery… at the expense of my sleep, eyesight and probably part of my sanity.)
* * *
The Growing Up Years
Clearly my adolescent years had been spent on an extravagant amount of reading, which left me highly-strung, oversensitive, given to romanticism, prone to making huge whopping life mistakes and in need of a good shaking-down back to sense and reality. These, my ‘Growing Up Years’ in university, were the years in which I tried to cut down hard on my reading to try to focus on my new direction in life and looked to hall, God and medicine to keep me grounded
21. Quo Vadis — Henryk Sienkiewicz
22. Between Silk and Cyanide — Leo Marks (non-fiction)
23. When We Were Orphans* — Kazuo Ishiguro
24. King Lear* by William Shakespeare (my favourite Shakespeare play)
25. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
26. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (this is not in the “Formative Years” because it made no impact on me then)
27. The Thursday Next series / Nursery Crime* series — Jasper Fforde, ESPECIALLY The Big Over Easy (I LOVE IT)
28. Theatre* / The Razor’s Edge / The Moon and Sixpence / The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
29. The Aubrey/Maturin series* by Patrick O’Brian (UNSPEAKABLY GOOD STUFF — BOTH GREAT WRITING AND GREAT FUN)
30. The Untouchable* — John Banville (perhaps the most brilliantly written book I’ve EVER read)
(Other things memorable during this period: The Dambusters by Paul Brickhill, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, Oliver Sacks stories, Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William R. Maples, The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Inspector Rebus series and short stories by Ian Rankin, CS Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Mark Haydon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, some Tennessee Williams, Julian Barnes, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.. although it’s not as nice as Narnia, whatever Pullman may say ;P The Saint series by Leslie Charteris – I’ve only read a few. The Secret History by Donna Tartt… thanks to Siu Qey.)
* * *
And the Richest Language Award goes to…
- Dorothy Dunnett
- John Fowles
- AS Byatt
- Peter Carey
- John Banville
Funnest Writing Award goes to:
- Dorothy L. Sayers
- GK Chesterton
- William Thackeray
- Patrick O’Brian
- Ian Rankin
- PG Wodehouse, James Herriot, Gerald Durrell … bow before the masters!
Most Gek Sim (=Depressing; Hokkien for ‘Heart Ache’) Stories Ever:
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – this takes the cake as the Most Traumatizing Reading Experience of All Time
- Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey – also very traumatic. My friends to whom I recommended it got PTSD from this one
- Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy… and most of Hardy’s stuff actually… what’s wrong with that man? 
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, another dour author if ever there was one.
- The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin Jr
- Le Morte d’Arthur. Sighhhh
* * *
Fictional crushes (in chronological order)
1. Peter Pan (age 6-8)
2. Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped (age 9) – dear me, I even know how to sing The Song Of The Sword Of Alan! (in English translation)
3. Sir Gawain (age 9-16)
4. Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (age 12-13)
5. LORD PETER WIMSEY (spanning a long period from 13 to present)
6. Algy Lacey in the Biggles books (age 11-18)… hahaha <3…not so much a romance as a childhood friend and companion through my teenage years.
7. Jean Prouvaire in Les Miserables (age 11-18)… oh! EVEN MORE HOURS spent on Jehan. my most high maintenance crush. the only one with whom I was actually in love… oh well, 'in love'. and the only one besides Alan Breck who's not an Englishman so far haha (and the following three are all Scottish…)
8. Francis Crawford from the Lymond novels/ Simon Templar from the Saint (age 14-19)
9. Adam Blacklock from the Lymond novels (very similar to Wedge in some ways) – (age 14-19)
10. WEDGE ANTILLES.. (age 15-present) a guy who's good enough to render all other fictional characters I ever met after age 15 uncrushworthy for ever after. hahaha. (Get it? Wedge? Scottish? oh never mind…hee)
* I forgot to mention Stephen Maturin. (age 19-present). But he's not so much a crush as he is LIKE ME.
so it's not a crush… it's an AFFINITY and a deep affection and respect and someone whose focus, dedication, erudition and medical knowledge I shall endeavour to emulate
* * *
There’re still lots of good books out there waiting to be discovered..
Books I’d like to read, some of which I have already taken steps towards acquiring:
1. Peter Carey – Theft
2. AS Byatt – The Children’s Book
3. George Eliot – Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda, etc
4. Austen – still doing my darndest to work up some sort of affection for her writing
5. John Buchan – The Thirty-Nine Steps, Mr Standfast
6. Donna Tartt – The Little Friend
7. Dickens – Bleak House, etc
8. Fforde – Shades of Grey
9. Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White
10. Dodie Smith – I Capture The Castle
11. Bram Stoker – Dracula
12. Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
13. Vikram Seth – A Suitable Boy (though Swati told me she was so annoyed by the ending that she wished she hadn’t read it!)
* * *
Authors I’d like to read or read more of but haven’t got around to, much…
1. William Faulkner
2. John Steinbeck (though I’ve read some of his shorter stories eg The Red Pony and The Pearl, depressinggg)
3. Tolstoy – haven’t touched this guy’s stuff yet!
4. More Chekov (have read a few of his plays and short stories)
5. More Dostoyevsky (have read Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment but not the others)
6. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
7. JD Salinger – like Jane Austen’s, I don’t take to his books naturally
8. Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson
9. Nabokov – haven’t read anything of his besides Lolita
10. More Thomas Hardy
11. Virginia Woolf
12. More Aeschylus and Euripides
13. More Corneille and Racine come to that.. (blame Prouvaire for making me feel I have to acquaint myself with these guys)
14. RK Narayan and VS Naipaul
15. Hemingway