Someone’s selection of their 15 favourite books tells as us much about them as a full-blown psychiatric profile. PHOTOS: SUPPLIED Perhaps you have hundreds of books or just a bookcase where a few dozen volumes reside. No matter how many or how few books you have you are not one of those lost souls who have no books at all, or perhaps even worse, own only recipe books or biographies of forgotten All Blacks.
The day will come when your library must be culled, perhaps when you move to a smaller house or when you realise that you will never get to reread most of your books. Choosing your First XV books is a cathartic exercise. The clinical term used by psychiatrists is "spilling your guts" but I’ll share my list with you.
The chosen kick off with The Pickwick Papers . Forget about the later bleaker Dickens and enjoy this demolition of lawyers and politicians and the celebration of village cricket and an old-fashioned Christmas. Sharing top billing is Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in which a master of gentle satire tells of a small Canadian town through the foibles of a cast of characters you wish you’d known.
I couldn’t omit Jeeves, but picking a favourite from Wodehouse’s books is not easy. I’ll take Right Ho, Jeeves in which Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School with an immortal and disastrous speech. By now, a poseur might have included the Bible or some work by Shakespeare but they don’t make my cut.
G.
