By my calculations (which are always questionable…), considering that I generally finish a novel or book within 48 hours, in my 40 years of life I should have been able to have read nearly 3,500 titles in my time.  Well, that hasn’t happened…

My favourite authors are Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Irving, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Saul, Mitch Albom and Salman Rushdie. I should most probably add Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and Terry Pratchett to that line up too. “Favourite” meaning that these authors have been consistently on my reading lists over the years.

I’ll read anything (I have the same approach to food) but particularly enjoy Fiction (Horror especially), History & Ancient Civilisations, Politics and deep thought-provoking content.

I do not enjoy Patricia Cornwell, Ayn Rand and James Patterson. I also have no intention of ever reading The Secret (Rhonda Byrne), Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) and The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) and anything by Danielle Steel. And I will never read Dan Brown again unless I turn senile and regress to basic comprehension of garbled verbage.

John Grisham is good for lawyers who want to read about lawyers…

While I’m at it; could someone confirm for me whether Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult are not in fact one and the same person?

If you can tell a good story then I’ll keep turning the page – no matter the topic.

My Top 40 Reads to 40

In no particular order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. Needful Things by Stephen King
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
4. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
6. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
7. Watership Down by Richard Adams
8. The Behavior of Moths by Poppy Adams
9. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
10. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
11. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
12. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
13. Watership Down by Richard Adams
14. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
15. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
16. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
17. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
18. The God Project by John Saul
19. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
20. The Shack by William P. Young
21. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
22. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
23. Everything by Roald Dahl
24. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
25. Everything by Dr Seuss
26. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
27. The entire Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
28. Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn
29. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
30. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
31. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
32. Beloved by Toni Morrison, United States
33. The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
34. Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen
35. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
36. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
37. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
38. Animal Farm by George Orwell
39. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
40. The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky

I’ve written up detailed reviews of many of the books on this list on my Pinterest board called “Books I’ve Read“.

How does your reading list compare? Let me know.