Fourteen books (and one play) I love that tell you about me lilithesque Thu, 27 Aug 2026 - 12:05 by lilithesque, Tue September 01, 2026 Disclaimer: Nothing at all connects the books listed below, except that in a Most-Dog-Eared-And-Dropped-In-The-Bath-Paperback competition of all time, these would be my top entries. I bring you this list, dear reader, not to say these are the best or even my favourite books I’ve ever read; not even to further expand your TBR or to assert any undeniably objective quality to the books in it. Think of it more as a primer on your author - me, that is. You can tell a lot about a person from the books they love, and I hope you’ll enjoy (or at least be intrigued, or just amused by) what you learn about me from them. We might even be - at least once, even just a little - kindred reading spirits. (Hey, if we are, come friend me on StoryGraph!) 1. Genome by Matt Ridley In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridge contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself. If I had only one book to take with me on a desert island, Genome would probably be it. I’ve always been a biology nerd: when other 1980s 5-year-olds were watching Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, I was wearing out my home-recorded VHS tapes of Once Upon a Time… Life. I knew ‘DNA’, ‘amino acid’ and ‘chromosome’ before I ever started science at school, so biology books are a particular joy of mine. Genome’s subtitle is the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters and that’s where the genius happens. Each chapter homes in on a single gene from one of our twenty-three chromosomes and frames a story around it: one that’s entertaining, informative, fascinating and often a little bonkers in the way only human biology can be. It’s this narrative structure that makes it so re-readable for me - for years now (long after some of the science has moved on, even, in a few cases) I’ll just pick it up and read a particular chapter or two over again, like a book of short stories set in our own genetic code. 2. Imzadi by Peter David “You’re saying” - he smirked slightly as he spoke - “that I’m incapable of falling in love with someone at first sight because I think with my glands and that automatically pushes out all higher emotions?” “That’s correct.” “Well, thanks a lot, Miss Troi.” “It wasn’t a compliment,” she said primly. “Higher emotions are what separate us from the lower orders of life.” “Is that all?” “Higher emotions, and table manners.” “Tell me, Deanna, have you ever had really good sex? Or is that just a theory to you?” …and if there were one book that would fight Genome tooth and nail to join me on that desert island (I can have one fiction and one non-fiction, though, right? Right?) it would be Imzadi. Before I knew what fandom was, I was a Trek fan: before I knew what shipping was, I shipped Riker/Troi. As a misfit child of the 80s and 90s, The Next Generation was my safe haven and my lens on what the world should be. ‘You are my family,’ Jean-Luc Picard says to his crew in Nemesis (a movie I saw twice on the same day, in a row) and they were. Riker/Troi my first OTP1, the first fanfic I ever wrote, and as of today are even one of the most recent because Trek endures and with it, my little fannish heart. Did I see Nemesis twice back-to-back because it’s the pinnacle of Trek movies? Hell no. I saw it because Riker and Troi tied the knot at long-fucking-last and I’d been waiting twenty years at that point. And re-reading Imzadi all that time. It’s not only a great Trek novel with true characterisation and time travel to make your head spin, it’s the best a really good romance novel by one of the best tie-in writers in the business. 3. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett The Hogfather reached into his sack and produced - - a very large model castle with, as correctly interpreted, pointy blue cone roofs on turrets suitable for princesses to be locked in - - a box of several hundred assorted knights and warriors - - and a sword. It was four feet long and glinted along the blade. The mother took a deep breath. “You can’t give her that!” she screamed. “It’s’ not safe!” IT’S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY’RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE. “She’s a child!” shouted Crumley. IT’S EDUCATIONAL. “What if she cuts herself?” THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON. You’d think with the impressively large number of amazing works by Sir Pterry, most of which I’ve read multiple times, I’d have had a harder time picking my favourite. Not so. While the Bromeliad trilogy comes a very close second and I have a special place in my heart for The Carpet People, I think Hogfather has been my go-to Discworld novel since I first read it decades ago. It was my favourite even before the incredibly good BBC adaptation, which I watch at least annually. Hogfather is also the Pratchett book that speaks to me the clearest. It’s Sir Pterry in his heyday, writing about wonderfully clueless anthropomorphic personifications wreaking havoc while exposing us to the deepest meaning of being human. It’s beautiful and hilarious and I would give at least one kidney to just once write a single story with the mastery of Sir Terry Pratchett. 4. On the Farm (The Children of Cherry Tree Farm/Willow Farm) by Enid Blyton “Daddy, you’ll let us see to the pigs when they come, won’t you?” asked Benjy. “And milk the cows too. We can clean out the sheds quite well. I did it once or twice at Cherry Tree Farm.” “You can try,” said Daddy. “Soon the farm will be working properly - cows in the fields, pigs in the sty, horses in the stable, hens and ducks running about, butter being made, sheep being dipped - my word, what a busy life we shall lead!” I was an avid Blyton reader as a kid. And not just as a little kid, either. I’ve never really paid attention to the intended age for a book - I read The Pickwick Papers aged eight (just for the challenge of it; I suppose I found it boring, since I can’t recall picking up any Dickens again until secondary school) - and yet while The Magic Faraway Tree and Amelia Jane slowly made their way to charity shops, the On the Farm trilogy stayed on my bookshelf throughout my teenage years and have a happy home on my Kindle to this day. I think it’s the Stardew Valley millennial dream of it all. Four siblings, in vaguely Pevensie-esque style, wake up one day to learn they’re going to pack up city life and go live on a country farm. From there it’s a cozy wholesome story of collecting hens’ eggs, milking cows, clearing fields and growing their own crops, befriending the local wild man… You see what I mean? 5. How To Teach Quantum Physics To Your Dog by Chad Orzel “So how do I tunnel through the fence?” “Well, you could eat fewer treats, and become thin enough to pass between the bars like the bunnies do.” “I don’t like that plan. I’m a good dog. I deserve the treats I get.” “And you get the treats you deserve. The other option would be quantum tunneling through the fence, but quantum tunneling isn’t something you do, it’s something that just happens. If you send a whole bunch of particles at the barrier, a small number of them will show up on the other side. But which ones go through is completely random. It’s all about the probability.” “So, I just need to run at the fence enough times, and I’ll end up on the other side?” I devour good science books almost as quickly as I do chocolate spread and let me tell you, that’s not something you should let me near with a teaspoon. But just like Genome, it’s the imaginatively structured ones that I come back to and read again. How To Teach Quantum Physics To Your Dog is exactly that: a quantum physics primer told via the conceit of Orzel’s developing relationship with his newly adopted and Very Smart pupper Emmy. Emmy, being Very Smart, understands more quantum physics than the average human being from the outset - and misunderstands just as much of it too (usually via the medium of physics-bending ideas on catching bunnies). So she’s the perfect surrogate for the reader and her voice stays with me for months in between reads. 6. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline My avatar materialized in front of my locker on the second floor of my high school - the exact spot where I’d been standing when I’d logged out the night before. I glanced up and down the hallway. My virtual surroundings looked almost (but not quite) real. Everything inside the OASIS was beautifully rendered in three dimensions. Unless you pulled focus and stopped to examine your surroundings more closely, it was easy to forget that everything you were seeing was computer-generated. And that was with my crappy school-issued OASIS console. I’d heard that if you accessed the simulation with a new state-of-the-art immersion rig, it was almost impossible to tell the OASIS from reality. There seemed to be, certainly at the time I read it, two pretty strong schools of thought on Ready Player One: that it’s awesome or that it’s terrible. So I figured it tells you quite a bit about me that I fall squarely into the first camp. Yes, it’s literally crammed to bursting with retro nerd references and geek-speak, so much that sometimes a single paragraph feels like you’ve been through a whirlwind in a comic book store. Yes, occasionally that’s a bit much even for me. And yes, it’s very much a classic hero’s journey story: boy from the poor side of the tracks makes unlikely friends and takes on the establishment, ends up with everything. That’s probably part of why I enjoy it as a story, not just for being stuffed to the gills with references that make me go ‘oooh! I remember that! That was cool’ - though that and the virtual-reality-game-future wrapping are just as enjoyable for me. Thanks to the sheer length of my TBR I still haven’t read Ready Player Two, or listened to the audiobook which is narrated - no doubt excellently - by Wil Fucking Wheaton. (Both are high on my list.) I can’t speak to the movie either, but my sense is that while the story may translate well and it’s a book made for a CGI-fest, it’ll miss something in the translation from written word to silver screen… so I’ll stick to trying to get a re-read in soon. 7. Parasite by Mira Grant On the balance of things, maybe I’d gotten off lightly. Maybe losing my memory was a blessing. Dr. Morrison’s disappointment visibly deepened. Clearing his throat, he flipped to another point in my journal, and read: ’Last night I dreamt I was swimming through the hot warm dark, just me and the sound of drums, and there was nothing in the world that could frighten me or hurt me or change the way things were. Then there was a tearing, ripping sound, and the drums went quiet, and everything was pain, pain, PAIN. I never felt pain like that before, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t scream— something stopped me from screaming. I fled from the pain, and the pain followed me, and the hot warm dark was turning cold and crushing, until it wasn’t comfort, it was death. I was going to die. I had to run as fast as I could, had to find a new way to run, and the sound of drums was fading out, fading into silence. If I didn’t get to safety before the drums stopped, I was never going to get to safety at all. I had to save the drums. The drums were everything.’ I’m really not a fan of horror. I don’t like gore, creepy things meant for making nightmares, or jump scares. I hate unexpected adrenaline in my bloodstream (hell, I’m not always a fan of expected adrenaline in my bloodstream). But it turns out that science horror, like science fiction? Gimme! To tell you that I finished Parasite in a single night would not be an exaggeration. My partner, who’s even more of an avid reader than I am2 finished it first and, in a true feat of willpower, managed not to spoil me for anything but did encourage me to read it as soon as humanly possible if I planned to3. I picked it up. They went to bed. They got up. I was just finishing. I can do no less than to refuse to spoil you, too - suffice it to say, I devoured the rest of the trilogy in similar time and I’m now open to an entirely new genre of weird and wonderful thanks to Mira Grant. 8. The Dark Is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; Five will return, and one go alone. Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long; Wood from the burning, stone out of song; Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw; Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before. Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old; Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea; All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree. I suspect if I were the library-book-stealing type, the battered black tome of The Dark is Rising Sequence I consistently re-borrowed from my school library would have been one of my first targets. Luckily for the - I’m sure many - students who came after me, I’m not a filthy heathen and so that copy probably introduced many, many more people to the delights of the Arthurian fantasy genre. Like On the Farm, I consider it a little bit of a cheat having put this whole sequence on the list, but I’ll argue in return that I’ve never read this book as anything other than a big fat beautiful omnibus edition. Cooper packs so much into the story that it feels to me like it should be firmly in the realms of Chonky Fantasy Novel rather than a series of five (which is how you might find it published now). These days The Dark is Rising Sequence would be filed firmly under Young Adult, but it’s a great example of how that shouldn’t limit the scope or impact of a book at all. It’s part heroes’ quest, part blended British myth, part coming-of-age exploration, full to the brim with foreshadowing and moments of beautiful payoff. “Yes, indeed. My father had a dog named Cafall,” never fails to give me the best chills. 9. Pixel Juice by Jeff Noon Possibly, you could say that one evening, late in the future, all the mirrors in the world decided to join together. Whilst most people would consider mirrors merely as reflective surfaces, some of the more mystical religions proposed them to be doorways into some other, deeper realm. Rather now, see them as veins; the veins of some vast hidden creature along which light can travel. A creature with blood photons. For centuries this creature knotted its veins together, in such a way that each journey of light came back to its starting point. Thus, we saw ourselves. But now, with this joining at the silver, each mirror reflected not the gaze of the owner, but the shocked expression of another, stranger face. A stranger’s face. At which you could only grimace, or bellow, or stand in front of, dumbfounded. We have to imagine the mirror creature shrugging itself, perhaps, and coming out of the shrug with its tangle of veins rearranged into a new pattern. Perhaps it didn’t mean this to happen. Perhaps it did. When I first thought to put this particular list of books together - not my favourites, but my most telling books - Pixel Juice was the start of it. I’ve not read nearly enough of Jeff Noon’s work, but I’ve read enough to say it’s some of the most unique and bright and compelling in my Kindle library. Read that excerpt above - what imagination Noon has! Hardly anything in Pixel Juice is more than a few pages at most: it reads like found fragments of other worlds, not complete but not intended to be. Each short story is a glimpse at some insane new way to cyber-sci-fi the world. There’s a hint of old 50s pulp SF - I’m reminded of Bradbury in particular - in the sharpness of his writing: the subtitle of the book is Stories from the Avant Pulp and frankly that describes Noon’s style and genre to perfection. It’s a gift how quickly and cleanly he jumps us in and out of each piece, and most of all in how much story punches us in the gut while we’re there. 10. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson When I was little my mother used to say that I had “a nervous stomach.” That was what we called “severe untreated anxiety disorder” back in the seventies, when everything was cured with Flintstone vitamins and threats to send me to live with my grandmother if I didn’t stop hiding from people in my toy box. By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn’t hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me “quirky.” My teachers whispered “neurotic.” But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was. Doomed. The first sentence by Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess that I think I ever read was, 'This morning I had a fight with Victor about towels.' Go, open the link. Read the post. I’ll wait. (If you’re a Bloggess fan and already know where that post goes, go read it again. You deserve to laugh your lungs up today too.) Now imagine that post is actually page 370-something of a life-so-far memoir written by that same person, in that same style, with that same energy and joy and absolute batshit craziness. Now imagine that that same person not only understands but can express - with a stunning and unfair clarity that no one ever should - what it’s like to live with crippling mental illness. That either appeals to you or it doesn’t, but if it does, I suspect you’re already on Amazon4 hammering the BUY button like it’s broken. 11. Get Off the Unicorn by Anne McCaffrey “Has there ever been a case,” she said, smiling in her odd way at the riders, “where a hatchling didn’t choose?” Her suggestion was almost heretical and drew astonished gasps from everyone, including the boys. F’lar laughed. “You say the most outrageous things, Lessa.” “Well, has there ever been a case where a dragon didn’t choose?” Like so many of the best book/reader relationships, Get Off the Unicorn and I also met in the polished wood stacks of my secondary school library. It may even have been my introduction to Anne McCaffrey, which is a proud place indeed to inhabit in my reading life. I struggled the most with which McCaffrey to include in this list - surely Pern, but which? Dragonsdawn, which has always been my go to, or one of the newer third Pass series I’m surprised to be thoroughly enjoying? Or to admit that of all her works, I actually love the Talents of Earth series the most? Of course it had to be both and more. Get Off the Unicorn is, in many ways, a book of teasers: a short story collection of brief visits to Pern and Callisto, Barevi and the Federated Sentient Planets, and even more that are only glimpses into the potential of a half dozen more multi-novel sagas that could have been. It’s my favourite not because it’s the best of Anne’s work, but because a little piece of me is still crouched on a warm heating pipe between towering bookshelves on a freezing school day, off travelling among the worlds of Anne McCaffrey’s truly epic imagination. 12. A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear The wolf had noticed him, for her ears flicked toward him now and again, but she never moved her firelight-hazel eyes from her master’s face. Njall had seen her master before - had even seen her at his side - among the cottages that clustered around the roots of his father’s keep like goslings huddled at their mother’s feet. The wolfcarl was a big man, almost as tall and stocky as a troll himself, wild-bearded, his graying red hair braided back from his temples; the edge of the axe he carried was bright with nicks and sharpening. He was Hrolleif, the Old Wolf, high-ranked in the werthreat, and Njall knew the villagers - and the manor - owed him obedience and fear. Obedience, for he and the trellwolves and the werthreat were all that stood between the village and the trolls and wyverns of the North. And fear, for he was of the Wolfmaegth, the Wolf-brethren, and not quite human anymore. The more so because he had bonded a bitch, a Queen-wolf, with all that that implied. Those paying attention may have noted earlier in this post that I have what might be called a passing thirty year acquaintance with the world of fanfiction. So I should tell you that if I say a book ‘reads like the best of epic AU fanfiction’ then it’s the highest compliment - and A Companion to Wolves reads like the best of epic AU fanfiction. It’s queer pseudo-Norse fantasy with psychic wolves, grisly axe fights, and a beautifully built world that’s deep rather than expansive. The psychic-wolf-bond-driven romance5 has exactly the right edge of self-doubt and self-discovery - leading of course to the inevitable triumph and happy ending - for me and that’s really what reminds me most of some of the great fanfic epics out there and keeps me coming back to re-read. It’s to my eternal sadness that there are only two sequels and although they are worthy ones, they don’t quite repeat the perfect mix of ‘boy gains unexpected bond with psychic wolf, boy worries about being queer, wolf grows up and goes into heat, boy shags other wolf-bonded boy(s), boys all fall in love and together they save the world’. But really, what could? 13. The Collected Stories by Arthur C Clarke People of Earth, do not be afraid. We come in peace – and why not? For we are your cousins; we have been here before. You will recognise us when we meet, a few hours from now. We are approaching the solar system almost as swiftly as this radio message. Already, your sun dominates the sky ahead of us. It is the sun our ancestors and yours shared ten million years ago. We are men, as you are; but you have forgotten your history, while we have remembered ours. We colonised Earth, in the reign of the great reptiles, who were dying when we came and whom we could not save. Your world was a tropical planet then, and we felt that it would make a fair home for our people. We were wrong. Though we were masters of space, we knew so little about climate, about evolution, about genetics…. The above excerpt is from Reunion, almost the shortest story in this bumper collection of Clarke’s work but to me, the one that has stayed with me for decades since I first read it. Even if you’re not a fan, I’d implore you to find and read this one story - and don’t let your eyes skip to the punchline at the end. It’s worth the effort. But it’s not just Reunion I love - there’s History Lesson, Crusade, The Nine Billion Names of God, just to name a few. Silence Please, I Remember Babylon and The Road to the Sea predict technology that’s ubiquitous now. siseneG is a masterpiece of micro-fiction. The Collected Stories crams in almost a thousand pages of hard SF from one of the giants and yet every story is character-driven, whether human, Martian, or strangely unicorn-shaped alien telepath… 14. Stir Fry by Emma Donoghue “I was saying I bet I could teach you to cook.’” “I swear my mother’s been trying for years, and I’m a culinary cretin. All I ever liked doing were cake mixes, because you can blame them if anything goes wrong.’” “What could go wrong?’” Ruth held the heavy door open for Maria to walk into the sun. It dazzled them, held them on the spot a moment. Then the students following behind jostled them; they shaded their eyes and moved across the courtyard. “Well, once I did a sponge cake,” continued Maria, “only I forgot the egg, so it came out all pale. I was too mortified to admit my mistake, so my father thought it was the fault of the manufacturers, and got Mam to write them an outraged letter.’” “Did you get your money back?’” “Worse,’‘ said Maria.”They sent us twelve packets of the cursed stuff by return of post.” Much of this list might give you the idea that I’m not one for cozy fiction. This is similar to how the number of hours I’ve logged in Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft and the Diablo franchise might lead you to think I’m not one for cozy games, when in fact Animal Crossing6 and Palia rank among my most played and I’ve finished every Cats Hidden In… game available on the Switch. Stir-Fry is simply a quiet little queer romance novel, small in scope and cozy in feels, and that’s no shade at all because it does all of that wonderfully. If we were trope-tagging as is the wont these days the blurb would say things like ‘sapphic student romance’, ‘third wheel’, ‘omg they were roommates’, and ‘happy ending’. It was also the first of Emma Donoghue’s books I ever read - which made Room quite a departure! (Though I highly recommend that one too, the movie simply can’t do it justice.) +1. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard Thomasina: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? Septimus: No. Thomasina: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart. Septimus: No more you can, time must needs run backwards, and since it will not, we must stir our way onwards mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination. I don’t regularly read plays, and I wavered about even including one. I’d probably have come down on the side of not, except for the profound influence Arcadia had on my philosophical brain as a young adult, and the fact that I’ve never actually seen it performed - to me it’s very much a reading experience, just in script format. (Would I love to see it? Absolutely, but for all that it was/is an A-level assigned text, there’s always been a sad lack of accessible options in that regard.) While we’ve covered that I’m not a proponent of book stealing in general, my biggest school regret is not ‘forgetting’ to drop off my note-heavy copy of Arcadia after my final exams. The whole play fascinated me from the first read: it was the first time I analysed a piece of writing and really felt like yes, the writer did have all these metaphorical and philosophical undercurrents in mind. I wrote an essay about it titled Chaos Theory and Rice Pudding which moved my English teacher to multiple exclamation marks and still (mostly) holds up, and which I’m proud of to this day. …and that’s the end of the shelf I hope you enjoyed this little wander through my personality in book form. I’m thinking of doing the same for games and/or TV/movies sometime in the future, if that’s something that might be interesting. What book/s would you pick to tell me about you? One True Pairing, for those who immediately think wondered how I used them to authenticate logins.↩︎ You can check out their book blog at The Bibliollama!↩︎ Anyone who’s ever needed to OMFG! at someone over a book will know this exact scene.↩︎ or your non-evil bookseller of choice.↩︎ Yes, we already covered that I grew up on the Pern novels, what did you expect?↩︎ I nearly gave Stardew Valley as an example, but anyone who’s actually played Stardew knows it’s actually post-apocalyptic survival simulator with added NPC trauma-management minigames.↩︎ Featured image credit: “Close-up of stacked books with open pages creating a heart shape, indoors” by Yaroslav Shuraev is licensed under Pexels Free License. Tags books book review reading fourteen loves blaugust blaugust 2026 listicle