My Favourite books.

I feel that it would be interesting to have a thread where people write, not just about their specific favourite books, but about what kind of books they like, and why they like them

In my case, I really love reading. Even before I went to university I had about 1000 books all over the place in my bedroom. They fell into three broad categories. Firstly science fiction. The first book I ever took out of the local public library was Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars after which I became totally addicted to science fiction, I was fascinated by the idea of space travel and visiting other non-human worlds. Starting my collection while still in primary school, I would go down to the library and take out four books at a time, and by the time I was in my second year at school, I was buying four books a week to add to my collection, including the works of Isaac Asimov (though I didn't like his foundation series), Anne McCaffrey (anything), Phlip K. Dick, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson and the likes, now I have a much bigger collection of stuff by a lot of authors; and, along with others of my generation I began to read pure fantasy stuff including the Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the likes. Eventually, I found myself reading the likes of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, which I really enjoyed.

By my fifth year at school, I started reading crime/mystery/spy fiction, crime fiction on television, and discovered that there was a vast literature that could further satisfy my needs; starting with the more obvious stuff from Christie, Deighton, le Carre, and so on, and into the works of American writers across these genre.

At about the same time, I developed an interest in more serious non-fiction works across a whole variety of areas. I had read one of my father's encyclopaedias from cover to cover, and developed a thirst for knowledge of all sorts from science in all its forms to history and philosophy.

Now, because I was moving about a bit, most of my books are in e-format, because I could get them, including two broad collections of old e-texts (Gutenberg and Blackwell), most of which I will not read (there are thousands of them), but a lot of which I will, because it interests me, and I have a lot of newer stuff that I buy for my Kindle.