Library of America’s wonderfully bound collections of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Anyone interested in popular culture who wants to know what influenced Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Sin City, and Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (in America became the Clint Eastwood ‘A Fistful of Dollars’) should read Hammett’s Red Harvest.

Every book I buy on writing tends to stay on my shelf for reference. I’m gonna end up like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Stranger Than Fiction.

I could go on, but I’ll stop.

Of recent years I’ve made a point of trying to keep up with Australian fantasy so naturally I have the entire Marillier oeuvre on the top shelf. I also have all of Simon Haynes’s, all of Glenda Larke’s and all of Karen Miller’s as well as representative works by other Aussie authors, and I think they will all be keepers as well. The only overseas author I buy consistently and will probably keep for ever is Guy Gavriel Kay, although Jacqueline Carey is nudging her way in, too. Let me not start on non-fiction. I have enough to furnish a small library. Whenever I Get Tough and offload a few I always regret it within the week.

So many books, so little money, so little time…:-(

Amy, it is sad that many of my books are now only available in the mass market editions. I wish I could do something about it. Now, if someone made a Sevenwaters movie, maybe I’d get a reprint in trade paperback … One can always dream.

Re children’s books, and picture books in particular, I plan a follow-up post about those, as I’m rediscovering a lot of great ones now I have grandchildren to read to.

I have number of books on my shelf that have never been read. I bought them after I had read a copy through my book club or a friend had leant them to me, then after finishing the book, I just had to own it.

These books are:

* Flesh and Blood, Michael Cunningham
* too close to the falls, Catherine Gildiner
* The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
* The Turning, Tim Winton
* Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson
* Misery, Stephen King (my most recent addition, I only just read it)

MaryK

And speaking of Daughter of the Forest, the next addition to my keeper shelf will be the Sevenwaters trilogy. Juliet, did you know that a used paperback of the Australian cover for Daughter of the Forest is selling for $74 on Amazon.uk? I borrowed the books from the library and instantly knew they had to be on my keeper shelf, but when I went out to buy them, all that was available in the bookstores were the mass market paperbacks. The story is, of course, the same regardless of format, but I was disappointed. Unless they’re one of those “mouldy old paperbacks” one is unreasonably attached to, books that go on my keeper shelf aren’t mass market if it can be avoided.

* The Boy Who Wouldn’t Go to Bed by Helen Cooper
* Peach and Blue by Sarah Kilborne
* The Little Squeegy Bug by Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson

I like books with a poetic voice and a touch or two of magic–probably explains my love of Lord of the Rings, Pullman’s The Golden Compass and the fantasy genre in general.

Books I’ve borrowed and then had to buy post-read include David Eddings Belgariad series, Laura Kinsale’s meaty romance Flowers from the Storm, and your book, Juliet: Daughter of the Forest.

You forgot the books that compell us to collect and keep multiple edtions: I’d have to put the Narnia books on that list. I think my husband and I have three full sets of the books, with no inclination to discard of any of them.

I’m going to have to check out Saramango. Uh oh, another keeper book going on the shelf!