My Top 15

I was tagged by a dear friend in her Facebook note entitled 'My 15 Favourite Authors'.

I have always been an avid reader, and this excercise made me think for a while, for these reasons:

i) My God, I have read tonnes of books...but some of the most memorable ones are those I read as a child. When I started my primary school, I remembered how a well-meaning acquaintance came to me with a book in her hand to test my English reading skills. The book in question: 'Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes'. Humpty Dumpty? Cow jumping over the moon? Ridiculous, but fun indeed...

A steady diet of Enid Blyton's books marked my progress into bibliophile territory after that. Young boys and girls on holidays always have some mystery to solve, and they can be great sleuths too (Famous Five & Secret Seven series). In the Malory Towers and St Claire's series, girls learn English, French, and sports at the boarding schools, apart from manipulation and trickery to get what they want ...which never go unpunished, of course.

I also discovered Tolkien with 'The Hobbit'. My, he made Middle Earth so believable, it was pure magic.

ii) Nowadays, I pick books to read by genre rather than author. Crime, thriller, true accounts, horrors, biographies and espionage feature highly on my list. So that's why even if I only read one book from an author, I favour him/her based on my assessment of that particular novel (In this case, I'll name the book by the author's name to indicate it's the only book I read).

Here's my 15:

1. Enid Blyton
2. Jalaluddin Rumi
3. Tom Clancy (Executive Order)
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Dominique Lapierre (City of Joy)
6. Thomas Harris (created the character named 'Hannibal Lecter')
7. Agatha Christie
8. Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
9. Roald Dahl
10. Mohd. Ismail Sarbini (author best known for children fiction in the '80s)
11. Clive Cussler
12. Mother Goose
13. Stephen King
14. Robert Maynard Pirsig
15. Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking)