#BookadayUK Day 9 - Most Powerful Storytelling

For today's choice, I was very tempted to go with Amazon's fabulously passive-aggressive email telling us to email Hachette's CEO. It's the best work of fiction I've read all day. Unfortunately, it's not a book, so I'll have to go with something else, which means I've got to work out what "powerful" is.

To me, a powerful story is one which immerses me in the world of the protagonist, which engages me whatever they're going through and which leaves me feeling differently about things. I have two books in mind. The first is Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry because it's done so perfectly.

But my pick - despite my wanting to try and steer away from books which are already popular - is Caitlin Moran's How To Build A Girl.

There is a section near the end of the book in which she talks about cynicism and what it does to you, and it not only made me weep hot buckets of salty tears all over my keyboard - and is making me well-up now, dammit - but which made me consciously go out and change something. Off the back of those pages I realised some things about myself and I made the active decision to be different.

And now I feel powerful. And I have a dress covered in Unicorns.

#BookadayUK Day 8 - Never Fails to Cheer Me Up

This is probably the easiest pick for me - It's Bill Bryson's memoir The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid.

It's an account of Bryson's childhood in 50's Iowa - it's a lot like the good bits of Stephen King's IT, but without the clowns proffering balloons from storm drains.

When the cat I had before Wren was dying, it's the book I read while I sat next to her to see if the final treatment the Vet had given her would do any good. It's the book I finished the following day after it hadn't. It cheered me up then. It would cheer me up now.

#BookadayUK Day 7 - Enjoyed by Several Generations

I'm casting my eye across my bookshelves and trying to come up with something I like, my parents have liked and which I'd pass on to any children I have (assuming there's somebody out there who's stupid enough to want to impregnate me). There are the wildly obvious choices: Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Roald Dahl, Harry Potter; but I want to pick something a bit different.

It's the 400th anniversary edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Bear with me.

It was a gift from my father to my mother when they were young and first married. My sister took it with her to university because she was reading English and American literature. I appropriated it some years ago and it now sits on my bookshelves next to The Lord Of The Rings and Bill Bryson's At Home (because I sort my books by size). It's not a book so much as an object. It has a particular smell to it - sweet leather is the closest description I can come up with.

I will never part with it because it's always been in my life, sitting on my Mammy's bookshelves as it now sits on mine.

Here is probably where something should be said about ebooks, and how "real" books are better because this can happen with them, but I wouldn't agree with that. For a start, this book never gets read. The print is tiny, the printing cheap, the pages flimsy, and it's Shakespeare. This book is not a book, it's an object. It could be a piece of jewellery, or a painting, or an item of clothing, or a hundred other things, but this one just happens to be a book.

But it also *is* a book. As I suffered through Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, my Mammy didn't suffer through Twelfth Night (because she didn't pass her 11+, but she read and loved it anyway), and I can't see a day when there isn't a room full teenagers complaining at length about these plays. Every generation is made familiar with these works, so that's a pretty good reason to chose it.

#BookadayUK Day 6 - Best for a Bedtime story

Nobody is stupid enough to impregnate me and I haven't had to read aloud to a sprog since I was legally old enough to be paid for doing things other than eating all their parents' biscuits. I also can't remember ever having been read a bedtime story, although I'm sure I must have been.

I'm going to pick a book I had when I was little: Possum Magic by Mem Fox. It's an Australian book (that's where we lived at the time) about a possum called Hush whose grandmother makes her invisible to keep her safe from all the dangerous things which live in the Bush. One day, Hush asks Grandma Poss to make her visible again, but unfortunately Grandma Poss can't quite remember how to do that - she only remembers it's something to do with human food, so Hush and Grandma Poss set off around Australia to try all the different foods there are.

The watercolour illustrations are gorgeous, the story charming, and I'd happily give it to any small child - although be prepared to explain what Vegemite and lamingtons are. Mmmmm ... lamingtons.

#BookadayUK Day 5 - Best Classic Hero/ine or anti-hero/ine

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of a thousand book bloggers' heads exploding as we each attempt to come up with a single favourite.

Part of me wants to pick Charles Arrowby from Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea because he is such a complete knobhead (and very entertaining with it), and part of me wants to pick Lady Sybil Ramkin from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels because she makes me feel better about myself, but this book caught my eye when I was picking best opening line (and would have been a winner for best opening paragraph).

I pick Valentina from Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian. She is a glamorous blonde Ukrainian Divorcee with whom the narrator's 84-year-old father falls in love. She explodes into the narrator's life "like a fluffy pink grenade", sits on her finacee's lap and lets him fondle her "superior Botticellian Breasts"; she wants a new life for herself and her son, an education for him. She is wonderfully awful and it's a fantastic book.

#BookadayUK Day 4 - Best Graphic Novel

There can be only one choice - When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs. Yes, that's right, the bloke who wrote The Snowman. It's worth taking a second to remember the end of The Snowman, because it's not exactly happy, is it?

When The Wind Blows is the story of a little old couple in a little old house, preparing for nuclear war which then happens. It's hilarious and heartbreaking and so beautifully realised. It's the blackest of blackest humours.

It's also worth mentioning that sometimes Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought" column is sometimes an utter delight: Customers who bought When The Wind Blows also bought a 500g bag of pink and white marshmallows, and a 48 sachet box of Felix As Good As It Looks cat food.

#BookadayUK - Best Collection of Short Stories

Once again not my best subject. I'm not a big short story fan and I was all set to chose Neil Gaiman here (because he's one of the only people whose short stories I can think that I've read) but then I remembered a marvellous book which is actually a collection of vignettes. It's also a bit of a cheat to treat it as a collection of short stories because the pieces do (in a way) form a cohesive whole, and also because it says it's a novel on the cover.

My pick is David Levithan's A Lover's Dictionary. It's the story of a relationship told as a non-linear series of moments; a word and then the relationship as it pertains to that word. Some entries are only are only a few lines, and I don't remember any as being longer than a page or two. It is lovely - the kind of short book you read in a single sitting, the kind which leaves you with the sense of a story you can't quite grasp rather than one which tells you what happened.

#BookadayUK Day 2 - Best Pairing of Words and Pictures

This is a real toughie because there is a real dearth of picture books in my life. It's not really fair to chose one I haven't read, so Hyperbole and A Half is out (although it fits the brief perfectly - the blogs are NOTHING without the illustrations), and I don't really want to chose any of my childhood classics like Winnie The Pooh.

My pick is Kit Williams' Masquerade. It's the story of lost trinket in more ways than one - the trinket of the story was hidden by Williams and the book's illustrations gave clues as to its location. In the end, the jewel was found thanks to some insider knowledge, but it's a fascinating puzzle with some gorgeous paintings, plus I really love hares.

#BookADayUK #1 - Most arresting opening line

I want to try and avoid the obvious with these posts, so while Rebecca is one of my perennial favourites it's not going to be today's pick. Instead, I hit my bookshelf and pulled out the books I love at random to check their first lines with surprising results: very few have an arresting opener. There are plenty which have an excellent first paragraph, but opening lines, not so much.

My choice, for a book whose first lines makes you stop and want to know more: Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane. Although I'm not much of an Urban Fantasy reader, I picked it up because it was 99p and because I vaguely know Stacia through AbsoluteWrite. It turned out to be a proper one-more-chapter read which demanded I create an elastic lunch hour.

Had the man in front of her not already been dead, Chess probably would have tried to kill him.