A selection of some my old childhood books – can you guess which is my favourite?

I’m always fascinated by other people’s reading habits (when I’m in someone else’s house I always look at the bookshelves) and I’ve really enjoyed the occasional My Life in Books series Simon T runs over on his blog Stuck in a Book. So I was thrilled when he invited me to take part in in the latest installment,  and you can read it here. I knew two participants were being featured each day this week (14 of us in all) and I knew we had to try and guess something about our unknown partner, but I hadn’t looked at my emails today (I went Oxfamming, then met up with some old friends), so it was a lovely surprise when I went online and found myself on Simon’s blog – and it was even more of a surprise when I found my mysterious fellow book lover was Simon himself! 

I felt quite honoured to be sharing the limelight with him, because he’s one of my blogging heroes and he’s been responsible for many of my book buys over the last couple of years – I tend to find that I like many of the books he recommends (but I disagree with him over Orwell, and nothing, but nothing, will induce me to re-read Nineteen Eight-Four, or Animal Farm, or any of his other novels).

The link above takes you to today’s My Life in Books, but the series began on Monday, and continues until Sunday, and you can access the previous three series and have a nose at people’s favourite reads. You can find out about their best-loved childhood book, their first adult book, how their reading has changed – and their ‘guilty’ reading secret (if they have one!). It really is a lovely insight in to the way books can help shape lives, and how much they can mean to people. And it’s interesting to see how popular certain authors and titles seem to be. So, if you haven’t already visited Stuck in a Book, please hop over and take a look.

My first book – coloured in by me, when I was very young…