Bill Hicks tells a story about being in a restaurant and a waitress asking him what he was he reading ‘fer’? He describes looking up in exasperation to check that she had asked WHY he was reading and not WHAT he was reading? After a few seconds, he says to her, not unkindly ‘I’m not really sure, but maybe its because I don’t want to end up as a waffle waitress in a restaurant.’

I love to read, always have; probably my earliest and best memory is my Dad sitting at the end of my bed telling me a story before going to sleep. I still need to read before I go to sleep now even if its reading a single sentence before the light gets switched off.

Like all things we love, we sometimes take them for granted, or forget we do for a while. Being made to read certain books as part of my English GCE study certainly tested that love and ironically the 3 books I was constantly berated for not studying I picked up, read and finished within 6 months of leaving school. (Miller’s the crucible, Steinbeck’s  Of Mice and Men and Orwell’s 1984)

Christmas 2004, I was stood in Borders Christmas present hunting. The draw of music, books and Starbucks coffee is like a giant magnet! Looking around at the front entrance it struck me that I would not in my lifetime get close to reading 1% of the books in the shop and then not even 0.0001% of the books in the English language. I worked out in my head there and then that if I read 50 books every year for 100 years I’d only ever read 5000 books in my whole lifetime! All those thoughts, ideas, stories, journey’s that I would never discover!! I decided there and then to at least make a minor dent in my 5000, and set myself a goal to read 50 books in 2005, a goal which I had fulfilled by December 31st 4.24pm 2005:

• Pefume – Patrick Suskind
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
• The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• The Old Man & The Sea – Earnest Hemmingway
• The Butterfly Tattoo – Phillip Pullman
• Count Karlstein – Phillip Pullman
• His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
• The Disney Way – Capodagli & Jackson
• Winning - Clive Woodward
• The lance Armstrong Performance Programme – Lance Armstrong/Chris Carmichael
• Blink – Malcolm Gladwell
• Spartan – Valerio Massimo
• The Last Legion – Valerio Massimo
• The Dice man – Luke Rhinehart
• Churchill – Addison
• Plato not Prozac – Lou Marinoff
• Boudica, dreaming the eagle – Manda Scott
• Boudica, dreaming the bull – Manda Scott
• The Da Vinci code – Dan Brown
• The 8th habit – Stephen Covey
• Divided Kingdom – Rupert Thomson
• Between a rock and a hard place - Aron Ralston
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• Everything bad is good for you – Steven Johnson
• Into thin air – Jon Krakauer
• Long way round – Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman
• Paula, My story so far – Paula Radcliffe
• Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Angels & Demons – Dan Brown
• Black, white and gold – Kelly Holmes
• Sabriel – Garth Nix
• Lirael – Garth Nix
• Abhorsen – Garth Nix
• White teeth – Zadie Smith
• The art of happiness – Dali Lama
• Pour your heart into it – Howard Shultz
• Stupid white men – Michael Moore
• Past Mortem – Ben Elton
• Far side of the world – Patrick O’Brian
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Deception point – Dan Brown
• Sepulchre – James Herbert
• Contest – Matthew Reilly
• Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• High Society – Ben Elton
• A death divided – Claire Francis
• The Bourne legacy – Robert Ludlum
• Metamorphosis – Kafka
• Crime and punishment –  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Everything bad is good for you – Steven Johnson

So why did I choose to read these books? Whim, recommendation, curiosity, perceived need? All these and more, but mainly just following intuitively my love of reading. I have no idea how I managed to read them all, I just know I always had at least one book always with me to fill all those funny gap times on the train at the airport, waiting for someone who is late, sat on the beach; the time seemed to find me.

So which ones did I really love? All of them took me somewhere, the 3 I’ve chosen here are the ones I haven’t fully returned from!

Our Books of the Month:

Plato Not Prozac	Plato not Prozac is the book that by far has had the biggest impact on how I think about thinking.Lou Marinoff sets out not to tell you the 7 principles of how to, but offers a way of thinking philosophically about life’s big questions. The sense of space I felt to explore these without being told ‘the answer’ was truly empowering.
The Old Man and the Sea	Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea is just the perfect story.It can be read on so many levels, is life a journey or a destination? What does it mean to be alone? How do you find your own sense of honour? But ultimately it’s a perfect beautiful story
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference	The Tipping Point is the Antithesis to the thinking that change takes time.  In the ‘right’ conditions, change be can created virtually instantaneous, and if you know the 3 levers that create it you can create your own tipping point! Gladwell for me builds on Robert Cialdini’s excellent book the ‘The Power of Influence’, and whilst superseded by ‘Freakonomics is still compelling.

So what are you reading?  We’d love to hear your recommendations so please join the conversation and make a comment in the space below.

Wondering who Bill Hicks is?  You might like to check out this video.