Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbyand Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (The Golden Compass). Eliot’s collected poems, Roald Dahl’s Boy, John Marsden’s ‘Tomorrow’ series, a Daphne du Maurier omnibus, the ‘Harry Potter’ novels, Peter Pan, The Odyssey, Treasure Island, The Secret Garden, Nabokov’s Lolita, F. This final pile is small-a little shelf of Highsmiths, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, John Green’s Looking for Alaska (both of which also fall under the PhD category), a copy of T. The ones I kept fell into four categories: those I hadn’t yet read (setting me loose in a bookshop is a dangerous and costly affair), those I wrote about in my PhD thesis (because Stockholm syndrome. Just looking at them is enough to induce a mild panic attack), those I found brilliant and want to have on hand to lend out and those special few I love more than most people and find continually comforting and inspiring. Most I hadn’t touched in years and, if I’m to be completely honest, I wasn’t going to pick them up again anytime soon. My books were double stacked and covered in dust. I recently did a fairly ruthless purge of my bookshelves. Margot McGovern rediscovers a favourite fantasy read.
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