I wish I could say that I emerged to the labours of this world (like so many seem to, nowadays) with limbs of paper and ink flowing from my eyes, but history was quite different than that. 

I hated reading as a child.

Well, maybe not hated hated, but it bored me out of my head. 

Until it found me.

You know the one, every reader knows it. It's the reason we're all here: that single book we couldn't put down, that made us bit our nails to the flesh, that strangled our throats and freed a kaleidoscope of butterflies in our bellies.

That's the book I've chased ever since.

From that day I was twelve and couldn't stop reading in spite of my car sickness, to every time I entered a bookshop afterwards.

And although not every book you read turns into a religious ecstasy (nor it needs to), whenever you do find a book capable of sating your hunger, I believe that's the closest thing to heaven-sent I shall ever experience in both this life and the next (if there's more.)

So here I am, counting my blessings.

✽ The city of dreaming books           

✽ No name (Wilkie Collins)               

✽ Book of a thousand days                

✽ The bronze horseman                    

✽ Emily the Strange (tetralogy)        

✽ Jane Eyre                                           

✽ The thirteenth tale                          

✽ North and South (Gaskell)             

✽ Peanuts                                              

✽ Il porto proibito (Radice/Turconi)

✽ Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

✽ The shadow of the wind