Favourite Books

Sometimes I wonder why I like a book or why I don't.

I like to read. A lot of people complain that children don't like to read or don't know how to read. To tell the truth, my experience with reading books at school isn't a good one. Looking back I can say, I haven't read a book at school that I truly liked. There are several reasons

1. I don't like to read I book because I have to. And more to that I don't like to read it in a certain amount of time.

If you have ever read the book "The Perfume" you know what I mean. You have to get yourself into the story. It's not easy to read and you have to be in a certain mood.

2. On occasions you only get an excerpt. I recall one from 'Jane Eyre'. The one with Brocklehurst and the hair cut. I thought what a strange story because it was taken from the context. Today I like 'Jane Eyre' because I've read the whole book (I couldn't recall I've read that excerpt until I reached the scene.)

3. They use authors because they are well known not because of what they've written.

I had to stumble through Dickens' 'Hard Times' in English (my first foreign language). First thing I did I bought a copy of the German translation. Another point which doesn't count in Dickens' favour: He has (in my eyes) a certain brutality in all his stories. I exclude 'A Christmas Carol' which I really like.

Thanks to the BBC I fell in love with an author who's a contemporary to Dickens: Elizabeth Gaskell. Her novel 'North and South' criticises the industrialisation as good as any of Dickens' novels and without his 'brutality'.

4. The themes of the chosen stories. I'm not one into science fiction, so Orwell and Wells are not for me (unfortunately both authors were on the school reading list). And '1984' and 'Animal Farm' are also brutal in my eyes.

But what kind of stories do I like. It is easy to criticise, but hard to come up with an alternative.

One I have already mentioned. Elizabeth Gaskell. Maybe the reason why they didn't choose her is that my English teachers were male. And love stories…

I do like biographies. It doesn't depend on the person. It is more his surroundings I find interesting. In my eyes you can learn a lot from that. What I don't like are autobiographies which rub the knowledge in every word and sentence in the reader's face. I've read two of that kind, both written in the style of a conversation. But there are thousands that fit the description of an interesting (auto)biography. Antonia Fraser has written several. I have to find the time to read the biography about Bess of Hardwicke

I do like weird little novels. All those stories where you can let your imagination run wild. The best examples are 'Hofman' and 'The Love of Seven Dolls'.

And I like to read those stories in my own pace and at my chosen time. I could be that I start a book read the first pages and put it away. And half a year later I start again and read it without interruption. Or I read two books parallel.

You see I like reading, but as I like it, not as others want me two.