Books and more books....

I was in Borders last week and managed to resist buying any books. That is probably a first for me, but I am trying to be mindful of the two shelves of books waiting to be read (that is forgetting of course all the books which have now been shelved elsewhere in the house, unread). However I was cheered up by a comment from AA Gill in Sunday times that everywhere else in the world, literate people have a list of books they have read, only the English (I am sure he meant British) have a list of books they haven't read. I resolve not to beat myself up for never having read anything Russian apart from Solzhenitsyn, not having read Proust, or Chaucer, or all the other worthies that I probably should have read and probably also never will.
However I am constantly surprised by the fact that worthy books are often better than we think they will be. A bookclub I used to belong to insisted on reading Dickens; the book selected was Bleak House (this was before the marvellous TV adaptation). I found myself 400 words in and still struggling to get interested, but then I could not put it down and the last 500 words fairly raced by. Fantastic.
I think it is a mistake to rely on TV adaptations to tell you about a book. I have seen at least three versions of Oliver Twist, but only the extended version at Christmas really gripped me, with all the extra characters and layers, and now I am determined to read the original.
Dickens breaks all the rules for writing. He relies on coincidence once too often, his nice characters are impossibly nice, especially given their backgrounds, but to be kind, he was writing pre Freud and perhaps did not know that a neglected and abused child is unlikely to grow up into an unselfish, brave and self sufficient citizen, but is highly likely to be a psychopath. His names are weird and wonderful, utterly unbelieveable, but entirely loveable. His characters are often larger than life, almost caricatures, and I wonder whether we could not learn from this as writers? Perhaps the best, most memorable characters are those who almost could not be real?

There is no such thing as a favourite book

OK here is a challenge for you. I believe that it is impossible for a writer to have a favourite book. Having a favourite book means a) you have not read that many books and b) you have not changed over time. Both fatal flaws in writers.
I have literally (sic) thousands of books in my house, nearly all of which I have read, and which I am keeping because I think I might want to read them again. Then there are many, many books which I have read and not kept because I did not like them, more still which were lent to me or borrowed from the library. How could I choose just one of these and say it is my favourite? My favourite is probably the last one I read and enjoyed. My favourites from 10 years ago are completely different to those I enjoy now.
In my teens and 20s I was addicted to SciFi and to a lesser extent, fantasy. I picked up a Robert Heinlein the other day and had to put it down - it was so dated! I read every Doris Lessing and Fay Weldon going in the 1980s - don't really like their more recent stuff.
So I have not listed favourite books on my profile; my favourites are fluid. The best reads I have read in the last few months are: Time Traveller's Wife, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell (incidentally I left her off yesterday's post, she is an Edinburgh writer too), Human Traces - Sebastian Faulkes. Can I also have Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone even though I read it more than a year ago?
Hey if you are into lists of books then don't miss Nick Hornby's the Polysyllabic Spree - a list of all the books he has bought in the last year. A great read if like me you are depressed by the number of books left in the world that you have not yet read, and the number of days left to you in which to read them.
Please don't recommend any books to me (unless they are exactly like the ones above and therefore you are sure I will love them) simply becuase it will make my list of books I must read before I die much longer and more impossible than it is now.