The books, ah, beloved books, how I wish I could read you all forever. Here are the ones I read over and over, good friends that have a special shelf all their own.

I follow in my mother’s footsteps with devotion to Gone with the Wind. Despite having varied feelings on the subject as I have gotten older, I still basically respect Scarlet, and wholeheartedly love Margaret Mitchell’s writing, and her descriptions of the south.

Also, anything by Jane Austen. Persuasion is my favorite, along with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice – who couldn’t like them? Tales filled with a cunning eye for character and denouements that are worth coming back to over and over.

Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden, is another. I have listened to this on tape multiple times, as well as read it in print. Every time I go through I am stuck by the juxtapositions he describes of wealth and servitude, glamor and entrapment. Again, an ending that is so fulfilling it surprises every time.

To be fair, I do not actually only read great literature. A sick-bed habit of mine is re-reading Harry Potter, by the British J.K Rowling. I admit to having read each of the books at least three times. Guilty pleasure, much?

Speaking of guilty pleasures, it doesn’t get any better than Elizabeth Young, another British author, who writes about twenty-nine-and-a-half year old women who live in London and either a) have no male prospects or b)discover their prospect is rotten. In the course of the joyful chapters, the woman finds a prospect and through some fairly painful process is able to catch him – and in the end we learn he loved her nearly the whole time, finds her fudgy bits lovable, her sometimes-obscenitied speech charming, and her entire self utterly sexy. My favorites are A Girl’s Best Friend, in which “he” is a veterinarian who saves her beloved dog, and A Promising Man – and About Time Too -in which a woman falls for a guy, but is 75% sure he is with her worst enemy from high school. Her friends are always catchy, and you just want to hug her parents. My copies are all falling apart from being read in the bathtub a few too many times.