It was so hard to pick ten series, especially as once I’d begun to think of them, all of my favourite books seemed to be part of a series!
I’ve read this series for almost as long as I can remember; I think I got my first one when I was about 8, and I certainly remember spending my pocket money on them in Waterstones on a Saturday morning. I desperately wanted to be Jo, whose sister starts a school in the Austrian Tyrol. The series starts when she’s 12, and the first pupil at the Chalet School, and ends, 62 books later, when her eldest daughter is head-girl. I still read them when I’m feeling ill, they’re perfect comfort-reading.
These also fall under the ‘comfort reading’ banner, especially since it takes about half an hour to rip through one! Martin’s stories about a group of 13 year olds who set up a club to make money by babysitting for the neighbourhood’s small children, intrigued me when I was about 7. Looking back, 13 seems incredibly young for that, but at the time they seemed like the most grown-up beings (especially Stacey, with her leggings and perm...)
Bernie Rhodenbarr owns a second-hand bookstore in New York, but makes most of his money from his second job, as a burglar. The books are fun easy-reading, and Bernie is, in the words of a reviewer quoted on the cover, ‘adorable’. They’re very American, but none the worse for it, and I’ve even learnt to forgive Bernie for loving someone called Lettice.
For a crime fiction nut like me, it’s surprising, and a little embarrassing, that I only read my first PD James novel last year. I really should have read them before as I was hooked after the first one. I’m trying to read them in order, starting with Cover Her Face. Adam Dalgliesh is a typically flawed policeman, who is also a poet, charming and very English. Luckily for me, James has written 14 Dalgliesh novels so far.
Written by the author who created Hamish McBeth, the Agatha Raisin novels were never going to be serious crime novels. Instead, they are as fluffy and light as cream puffs, to be devoured quickly, but addictively. Raisin is a middle-aged P.R. who moves to the Cotswolds, becomes involved in solving some local murders and sets up a detective agency. There are as many murders in her part of Gloucestershire as there are in Midsomer…
I love Oliver’s writing, and Before I Fall was one of my novels of 2010. This series explores what it would be like living in a dystopian world in which love was classed as a disease. Lena is approaching her 18th birthday, which is when citizens undergo ‘the cure’, when she does the unthinkable and falls in love. Deliruim is the first of a trilogy, the second part of which is published at the end of Feb. 2012. I, for one, cannot wait.
Slightly more serious than my other choices, Sassoon’s largely autobiographical trilogy are about George Sherston’s journey from a shy and nervous child, growing up surrounded by fox hunting and village cricket, to an officer in the trenches of the First World War, to his time at Craiglockhart hospital and brief time in Palestine and then back to the trenches. Sassoon is obviously a brilliant and lyrical writer, and this trilogy, especially the middle book, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, moves me every time.
Continuing my love of mysteries, I had to choose Bradley’s novels featuring Flavia de Luce, 11 years old when the series starts, and a keen chemist with a particular interest in poisons. She lives with her two awful sisters and her father in a crumbling mansion in the village of Bishop’s Lacey. She’s precocious, opinionated, wilful and fabulous, and I’ve loved all of the four books in the series so far.
My boyfriend introduced me to Sir Terry’s books, having loved them since childhood, and I do enjoy the ones written for adults, but the ones that really got me hooked were the ones featuring young witch, Tiffany Aching. They are apparently aimed at young adults, but they deal with much more serious issues than Pratchett’s adult novels, especially my favourite, I Shall Wear Midnight, but without being preachy or in any way less than fantastic, literally.
Last year I completed my Masters, and somehow I managed to persuade my supervisor to let me write my thesis on Poirot, which was ace. I started reading Christie’s novels when I was about 11, and have now read them all. Poirot is such a memorable character, with all of his quirks and his ‘little grey cells’, and even though I’ve read them all numerous times, they never fail to make me smile.
Thanks Sarah! There are a few series there I haven't heard of before and a couple that are already on my ever-growing TBR list!
How about you guys? Anything here you've read and loved? Anything that you'll be adding to your TBR list? Let Sarah and I know what you think!
