Crumpled pages.

I love to read, absolutely love reading.
My dream is that one day I will have a room in my future house, and it doesn't have to be a big, grand room, that is lined with wooden bookshelves filled with books. I remember trying to express this love I had for books to a fellow English student, but she didn't understand. She asked me why I wanted a book-filled room. I wondered why she was studying English when she didn't long to read, I always presumed that reading and English went hand in hand but maybe I was wrong.

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I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

This room of books I will have will be filled with books dirty from use and full of memories. It won't be full straight away but it will definitely keep growing and growing, with more memories added to the collection. They will all be different colours and sizes and each one containing an adventure of its own. The only other piece of furniture apart from bookshelves which will be in this room is a big podgy armchair which I can nestle into to sit and read for hours. The room will smell of the paper of books and every time you walk into it you will feel the sort of reverence you feel as you walk into a grand cathedral or an old ruined castle. 

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I think books were my first love.


This is a list of some of my favourite books that I've read. If you have a favourite, let me know! Maybe it will be added to my library one day!


The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
Journey to the River Sea - Eva Ibbotson
Emma - Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.  ~Paul Sweeney