SmartCooks (cooking but not blogging much these days) here. Facebook folks were posting their Top 10 Book lists recently and I started writing one but didn't get a chance to post it so... blog it is.
Writing a list reminds me that I used to read voraciously... Saturday mornings I’d
make the rounds of the various unique bookstores… Ottawa
Women's Bookstore on Elgin, and over to the Glebe to Prime Crime, the House
of Speculative Fiction and Octopus Books. An ambitious Saturday then saw me head to Sussex where the Children’s Bookstore was housed for years. All long before the era of the Big Bad Book
Box stores. My appetite for reading was
insatiable.
So my top 10 list
and, yes, I read a lot of series. I have
to start at book one when I begin a series and then follow
chronologically.
2) Millennium trilogy. It was so tragic Stieg Larsson died before we got book four. I raced through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire and then discovered that book 3 (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) was only available in Europe. A friend got it from a travelling friend who picked it up at Heathrow. She read all weekend and then called me when she was 20 pages away from finishing it. I raced over, got it, and took home the treasure. Like Brigid, I too now look for Swedish authors because of these books.
3) Harry Potter. I still laugh about waiting
for hours in long line-ups at midnight at various Chapters and then reading the
book all night. Ivan even made money one year as he left the store with several
copies in hand. A harried father raced
up, saw the line-up, groaned, and offered $100 for one of the books to take home
to his daughter. Why not?
4. Marcia
Muller. (Now above 30 books) featuring private investigator Sharon McCone
from the All Souls Legal Co-op, who tries to make a difference to her clients
and the world around her. Her life
becomes very complicated! 
5. Woman’s
Room by Marilyn French. I read this
book in 1997 when it was first published while sitting on a beach. I loaned it
to a woman next to me who read it. She,
in turn, gave it to her husband to read.
They ended up in a bitter battle of words. Oops.
6. May Sarton. I
prefer her 20-plus books to her journals.
I especially loved The Fur Person, a quirky novel for
cat lovers, with Tom Jones, a street cat who gives up his catting-around
lifestyle to find the right human companion.
It’s a must-read for all us cat lovers.
Her books were difficult to find in the 1970s and 1980s, long before
on-line ordering. I scoured bookstores
in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere to make sure I had all of them. 
7. Woman
on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. 1976.
Critics call it a classic utopian ‘speculative’ science fiction, I was
gripped by how Marge Piercy dealt with issues around feminism, social justice,
and mental illness. She also predicts
the rise of the Internet, and a world ruined by massive mega-cities and environmental
pollution. 
8. Tales
of the City. Armistead Maupin. These books were game changers in the late
1970s, opening up a life beyond the narrow confines of Ottawa. I devoured all six books. Alas, by the time Bob and I travelled to San
Francisco in the 1980s, it was ravaged by HIV/AIDS and many restaurants and
businesses were all shuttered. The only
bookstore that was thriving was ”A Different Light”, managed by a former Ottawa
Citizen writer, Richard Labonte, who both Bob and I knew from the Southam News
days. The Castro Street bookstore was named after an author, Elizabeth Lynn,
who wrote a science fiction fantasy (a world without cancer and pain) and in
whose honour the bookstore was named.
9. Colour
Purple by Alice Walker. Another game
changer, this time a novel set in the 1930s about lives I could barely
comprehend. A book that grips the soul
and I literally could not put it down. I
felt all the injustice, rage and triumphs of these women. It’s a terrific book (and movie). 
Or, it’s the The Giver, by Lois Lowry, the first in a series of four books about
Jonas, questioning life in a boring utopia of community ‘sameness’. Another game-changer. It’s been made into a movie and I’m
interested to see whether it lives up to my reading of it.
The walk down
memory lane. And then there’s Robert Crais, Lawrence Block (Burglar series),
Lord of the Rings series, Narnia series, the prolific Jonathan Kellerman with
sidekick Milo, and on and on and on. I barely read any newer books at all these
days. Retirement will likely see me
devouring what I’ve missed! 
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