chasing bawa

So, I’ve e-mailed the Big Green Bookshop with my list of five titles. After debating for several hours with myself (silently, of course), I’ve whittled my very long list to the following:

1) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
2) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
3) Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
4) The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
5) The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

There are so many more that have really left a mark on me such as Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age and Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, but I had to choose the five above because 1) my love and awe for them have remained undiminished, 2) I have obsessed about each one for many years after reading them and 3) they in turn have led me to search out new books and new subjects of interest.

While thinking about my favourite books, I realised in horror that in my post Favourite Writers: Fiction, I totally forgot to mention Irving Stone. I’ve read three of his books, The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo, Lust for Life about Van Gogh and Passions of the Mind about Freud which really impressed me. Stone’s fictional biographies are written with such colour and depth that it is as though you have experienced these incredible lives yourself. I read The Agony and the Ecstasy just before my trip to Italy many years ago to celebrate completing my first degree and was overwhelmed when I saw the Sistine Chapel. It was beautiful.