Regarding books

Nope, this isn't an entry about baked goods nor broccoli, it's about books, my favourite ones. I buy a lot of books and try to keep up with reading them, but always seem to be enticed by newspaper book reviews to buy more than I can read. And when at the book store, I linger over other books that attract my attention. The only thing that checks my spending is the cost (fancy that :). I recently nestled down at the bookstore to read the first 30 pages of Alice Sebold's 'The Almost Moon', only because it was still marked with its New Release price of $35.

My shelves contain mainly fiction, some sci-fi, a bunch of Lonely Planet guides and a few travel memoirs, only becoming turned off the latter by Frances Mayes' terrible sequel to an already annoying 'Under the Tuscan Sun'.
I buy them because I'm optimistic that if a book is good, I will revisit it over the years and eventually pass it down to whomever. (Also, I have been banned from my local library for over a year and a half now for accidentally-losing-and-then- finding-but-not-yet-returning a book.)

Anyway, most of the books sit on the shelves for years after their first read and I may occasionally revisit them. These aren't likely to be all time favourites but I am still fond of them nonetheless. The books that become fast favourites are the ones that upon finishing, I immediately start reading again. These are the ones where the language and dialogue are astoundingly original without being pretentious, there are no cliches in the story (a classic cliche is the new girl in a big city working for a publishing or fashion house...snore :) and you wished you lived through some or many of the scenes.

So here are the books which I have loved and which will probably fall apart before I bestow them on future readers:

'Neuromancer' by William Gibson
'Three Junes' by Julia Glass
'High Fidelity' by Nick Hornby
'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro
'Remains of the Day' by Kazuo Ishiguro