Influential Books

0-10
The Borrowers
The Hobbit
Elf Quest
Swallows and Amazons
The Pink Motel
The Boxcar Children
That book about the foxes where one of them lies down in the train tracks at one point

(Narnia, Roald Dahl, Dealing with Dragons, young children ones eg The Castle of Cats or Goodnight Moon?)

10-20

The Castle Franz Kafka
Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
The Chocolate War Robert Cormier
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock TS Eliot
Judas Iscariot Countee Cullen
Moby Dick Herman Melville
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

20-30
The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky
War and Peace Tolstoy
Lolita Nabokov
Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck
The Jungle Upton Sinclair
A Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mother Courage and her Children Bertolt Brecht

30-40
Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro
Cloud Atlas David Mitchell
The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy
Daniel Deronda George Eliot
Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood
Walking Naked Alyssa Brugman
A Brief History of Seven Killings Marlon James?

Why I won't sell the house

So I'm walking home to pick up the car at about 6:30 at night. It's August here just coming out of winter and sweater weather if I weren't stubborn.  Anyway I'm coming through the park and the air is like perfumed. It's the frangipani or something, that white flower smell that's one of my all time favorite smell in the crisp air.  But it's so potent, it feels like there's almost visible globules of that scent hanging from the dark trees. It's like a fairyland.  I love my sky palace. I really do. We're totally obsessed with it at the moment and always want to be there. But in the burbs, this is just what coming home on a regular Thursday is like.