by Ramona Koval
I sometimes read on my tablet computer. Late at night when I see a book I want, and that I must read now, the ease and immediate gratification of digital access suits my temperament. But there are dangers. A New Yorker cartoon pictures two men talking under an umbrella at the beach. One has a massive hardback open on his lap and the other says, ‘I got tired of Moby Dick taunting me from my bookshelf, so I put it on my Kindle and haven’t thought of it since.’ But while I can be disconcerted by the feeling that, despite the digital bookmark, I don’t really know where I am in a book, I enjoy the idea of carrying a library around with me. I have become my own mobile bus library.
But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep.
Acknowledgments
In a life, some years are harder than others. Thank you Penny Hueston, Alison Arnold, Jane Novak and Chong Wengho from Text Publishing for welcoming me to your fine table, and for helping my work to sing.
And to Michael Heyward, your impeccable judgement and ability to magic a book from the murky depths is legendary. I join the league of grateful writers.
And to my family, who understand only too well the hazards of being related to a writer.
And to the writers who made me what I am.
Book List
The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910-1912 by Roald Amundsen
The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Home Management: Volume 1, edited by Alison Barnes
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Gathering Evidence: A Memoir and My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard
The Magic Faraway Tree, Noddy Goes to Toyland, Here Comes Noddy Again, Be Brave Little Noddy!, Do Look Out Noddy! and Noddy Gets into Trouble by Enid Blyton
Stories in an almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey
Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov
Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Cheri, Claudine at School, The Vagabond, My Mother’s House and Sido by Colette
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Water Log: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain and Wildwood: A Journey through Trees by Roger Deakin
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
House of Dolls by Yehiel De-Nur
Check Your Own I.Q. by Hans Eysenck
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by Derek Freeman
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Goethe
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Heart of the Matter and Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking
Catch-22 and Now and Then by Joseph Heller The Histories by Herodotus
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft across the South Seas by Thor Heyerdahl
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, The Soccer War, Another Day of Life, Imperium, Shah of Shahs, The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
On Reading by André Kertész
The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby by Charles Kingsley
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
Independent People by Halldór Laxness
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory and The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound by A. R. Luria
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Coming into the Country by John McPhee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Communist Manifesto and Collected Works of Marx and Engels by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Growing Up in New Guinea and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
The Children’s Encyclopaedia by Arthur Mee
Moby-Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville
Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Tale of Genji by Murusaki Shikibu
Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship ‘Fram’ 1893-96 by Fridtjof Nansen
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Down and out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Amores (The Loves), Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love), Medicamina Faciei Femineae (On Facial Treatment for Ladies) and Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Hidden Persuaders and The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
Sweet Valley High by Francine Pascal
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
Natural History by Pliny the Elder
The Letters of the Younger Pliny by Pliny the Younger
Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie
What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 and Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway, Journeys to the Interior by Nicolas Rothwell
Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir of Jean Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley
A Leg to Stand On, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Uncle Tungsten and Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Rosalind Franklin and DNA by Anne Sayre
Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals by Robert Falcon Scott
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny
South: The Endurance Expedition to Antarctica by Ernest Shackleton
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Collected Stories, Enemies: A Love Story and The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dav
a Sobel
Cancer Ward, The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hills End by Ivan Southall
The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
The Essential Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
To a Mountain in Tibet and Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler
The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana, translated by Sir Richard Burton
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
Down among the Women by Fay Weldon
Cassell’s Book of Knowledge, Harold F. B. Wheeler
A Fringe of Leaves and Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Arabian Nights
Beowulf
The Bible
The Faber Book of Reportage
The Icelandic Sagas
The John and Betty books
The Little Red Hen
The Mabinogion
The Mahabharata
Sarajevo Haggadah
Victorian Readers—‘A Brave Australian Girl’ by Anonymous, ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ by Banjo Paterson, ‘Bell-birds’ by Henry Kendall, ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar