“If there’s no one left alive, no one will remember.”
Terry Pratchett
Those aliens are always looking for houses to abduct, you know.
The Silmarillion – J.R.R. Tolkien. There’s a small chance my copy is a first edition, though it probably isn’t. (I almost hope it isn’t, because the dust jacket has fallen off due to over-reading.) More importantly, it’s my favourite book and it feels like home.
2, 3 and 4. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien. I have these vast and gorgeous editions illustrated by Alan Lee, who is just the perfect artist for Tolkien, really. Also, these are the copies I have read every year for more years than I can remember, and they feel like they have a history, a palimpsest of all those years of experience, a record of literary love.
5, 6, 7 and 8. So for my last birthday the Circumlocutor had the contents of this blog and its previous incarnation on blog.com printed and bound in lovely green leather and linen and with my name on and everything and, well, it’s a no-brainer really.
9. The Last Hero – Terry Pratchett. This is another beautifully illustrated book, and one of my favourite Pratchetts. Sometimes I flip through the pages just looking at the pictures.
10. Lirael – Garth Nix. Like The Lord of the Rings, this is a book that I have lived with and loved for years. My favourite of Nix’s Old Kingdom books, it has a history as a physical object as well as a story.
(The theme for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 