Yesterday I turned 40. I’m not a huge one for marking dates but a lot has changed in the last year; I’ve moved town, started a new job, found and bought my own house, worked hard to do it up and make it liveable, self-published a novel, been in a play and am rehearsing in another one. While celebrating in more conventional ways, I’ve also made two book lists of 40 books at 40.
I didn’t mean to make two, but it turned out that 40 books at 40 seemed to imply two very different things - one was the 40 books that I consider my favourites now that I am 40 and the other were my 40 favourite books at each year of my life. So I did that.
40 favourite books now I am 40.
The 40 books that are my favourite now is probably the most predictable of the two lists. It includes nine books from the eighteenth century and another seven books set in, or about it. The list is primarily fiction, with six non fiction books in there. It contains two scripts, one short story collection and four books of poetry. There’s a diary, three books of essays, a translation of a mediaeval bestiary and some unclassifiable books like The Codex Seraphinianus and The Flight of Dragons. Of the children’s books, only one of them is a book I read when I was a child.
I didn’t follow playlist rules, authors were allowed more than one book. Samuel Johnson has two (though there are two other books about him), Oliver Goldsmith also has two, as does TH White, Patrick Hamilton and Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a very male heavy list, which is a little strange as I now probably read a pretty equal spread of male and female writers.
The list of my favourite books at the moment of my 40th birthday certainly show me to have a type, a zone of interest that I like to paddle in, but also show a fairly wide range of tastes and a fondness for playfulness, nonsense and a little self-reflection. I don’t know if it contains any ‘red flag’ books, if it does, they aren’t any of the ones most usually cited. There’s also nothing newer than 1997 (unless you count a 2018 retelling of Gilgamesh - making it both the oldest and newest book on the list).
Favourite books for my 40 years.
The other is probably more interesting, to me at least. I can see through the titles a mini-biography, a story of my life in books.
It starts with a bunch of ladybird books. I had to rely on what I’ve been told about myself to put those down. I thrilled to the ‘trip tripping’ of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, I followed people around, forcing them to read Tootles the Taxi to me and I dressed up as a Wideawake mouse for school.
Then I moved into my Roald Dahl phase, an author I read voraciously and repeatedly. It was hard to pick the representations of his work I most liked, except for Fantastic Mr Fox, which was the inspiration for the first long story I ever read. This is followed by Robin Jarvis, whose strange, dark and gripping animal tales were my favourite for a while. I don’t know how many times I’ve read The Alchemist’s Cat, which I did a presentation about in class as my favourite book.
Then we hit a dark period, when my reading comprehension was at a level enough to read most adult works but my social and emotional comprehension not enough to get much out of them. There was no designated YA fiction then and teen fiction seemed to be burdensome slice of life or turgid fantasy. As a result I flipped between exciting monster stories like Jaws and Jurassic Park and classic children’s literature I’d missed like Alice in Wonderland.
The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn is there to represent my fondness for Adrian Plass, a christian writer who focusses on the difficulties of being a mere human trying to live up to a divine plan. I also found him very funny and Leonard Thynn had me howling with laughter.
Scepticism Inc is probably the most impactful book I’ve ever read. It’s a very silly look at religious belief and narrated by a shopping trolley. Through this book I started to focus my religious doubts (which I think my Adrian Plass period was an attempt to address). It also led me to another favourite author, Kurt Vonnegut, and led me to pick a BA in philosophy and an MA in writing. Despite the impact it had one me, the amount of times I re-read it, I don’t think it’s all that good any more. His second book The Astrological Diary of God is a step down
Then was university and my Kurt Vonnegut phase. It was a great phase but after a time, I’d read all his books multiple times over and it was a couple of years before I got into my next big thing, the eighteenth century. This was a big initial rush full of gems that I’ve talked about on this blog. After that I re-expanded my reading to cover more eras, genres and variety but still touching back into my favourite century of works every few months.
One big change over the years is that I now rarely re-read, the world of writing is so large and my time left on this planet a good chunk less, so I go onwards, discovering new things and having a lovely time of it. I hope to go for another 40 years at least.
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