MY LIFE IN BOOKS
Author Mandy Baggot reads books only once… but she is quite happy when there’s a TV series to go with them!
I know it might sound like a bit of a cliché for someone born in the late 1970s, but I absolutely loved Enid Blyton books when I was young. My favourite was The
Faraway Tree series and I used to pretend that all these magical things happening to the characters could just as easily occur in my back garden! I bought all the books for my children, and they loved them as much as I did.
I absolutely adored Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I studied it for GCSE English, and I remember thinking how fantastic it was to have a book written in 1847 still having such appeal. I totally fell for Heathcliff! What an alpha male hero! A few of the books I had to study weren’t my cup of tea, but I could not get enough of this atmospheric, brooding tale from the moors! A true classic.
From the very beginning, even when I was a teen, I always wrote romantic stories, but the book that really made me realise how much I love the humour that goes alongside that was Sophie Kinsella’s The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic. This book is hilariously funny but also ver y real. You can’t help but root for Becky Bloomwood and, for me, this is romance and comedy at its best. It made me realise how impor tant making people laugh really is.
Shock! Horror! I don’t re-read books! So, when I have some quiet time, I don’t have an old favourite I always turn to. When I want to get stuck into a stor y I will head online and find a cosy romance or a twisty thriller I haven’t read before. I absolutely love discovering new books or, equally, new releases from a favourite author. I adore Sue/Suzanne For tin’s books – from the psychological drama The Girl Who Lied to the beautiful historical The Forgotten Life of Ar thur Pettinger.
Reading? Or watching TV? I really love doing both and I absolutely cannot get enough of a book that has been made into a TV show so you can love it in both formats. Take Robyn Carr’s Virgin River, for example. Robyn’s books have been turned into a major Netflix series that has just been renewed for a Season 4 and 5. Hooray! If you haven’t read the books – they are great, and I haven’t read them all yet! And, if you haven’t watched the TV show – where have you been? Some people think that you should fall on one side or another – reading versus watching – but I believe the two things really can complement each other and Virgin River is a great example of that.