We were too poor for holidays, so I holidayed in Narnia in my head, instead. Aslan was the sexy pivotal lion in my life, plus it's made all wardrobes unexpectedly and lingeringly exciting.

Forrester was the oldest of 8 children, in Depression-Era Liverpool. No school, no medicine, no hope - her life was exactly as mine would have been, had I not had the incredibly good fortune to be born after the introduction of the NHS and the Welfare State. I read it as a direct letter from her to me. It politicised me instantly.

Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet. But the modern reader can't help but note that, as a story of a working class adolescent who thinks he's intellectually superior to everyone around him, is desperate to be a writer, and wanks a lot, Portrait of a Young Artist is also incredibly similar to.

One of the funniest books ever written. Read it as a teenager, and think Adrian is the hero. Read it again as an adult, and marvel at his mother. There are more laughs in this book than any other ever written.

I would have done it with every character in HHGTTG in turn. Even Marvin, the Paranoid Android. Nerdy, liberal, wry, sci-fi and dazzlingly inventive, before that was the fashionable thing to be. Forget the film. Adore the book that invented the iPhone (The Guide) and Google Translate (the Babel fish)

A history of British food that has the same, odd, dreamy, lysergic air as Through The Looking Glass. Takes you through an England of roast swans, possets, syllabubs, gold-leaf jellies, boiled elvers, and elderflower fritters.

It's kinda old hat now, I guess, to have a paper dictionary, but I loved our dictionary so much-flicking through a book WITH ALL THE WORDS IN was like having a book with a million Christmases in. I kept a list of my most precious words on my wall, like trophies, or pressed flowers, or phone-numbers of hot boys: "Jaguary, mimosa, cathedral, lilac, shagreen, ardent, isosceles, attar of roses, uxurious, leopardskin, jubilee, zoo." Every dictionary contains every word, and therefore every book-just not yet in the right order. Just like every person has a book inside them, too-just not yet in the right order. We are all dictionaries.

Once you put aside the matter of OH MY GOD THE SLAVERY JESUS LOOK AT ALL THE FREAKING SLAVERY STOP WITH THE SLAVERY, MAN, the core conceit of this book is amazing. It the most famous teen literature ever-Scarlett is 16 when the Civil War kicks off, and what keeps her going through the complete destruction of her family, status and life is her unrequited love for Ashley Wilkes. The idea of that kind of demented fantasy-let's face it, Ashley's a drip-keeping you going through awful years is such a key Teenage Girl Thing. The fuel is mad unrequited love, keeping you going. It inspired both the "Fantasy Love Affairs" chapter in How To Be A Woman, and most of the plot of How To Build A Girl, hahaha.

I'm sure, if you scan people's brains, you can see the bit that lights up if you've read Alice In Wonderland. It is actually a cruelty for a human being not to be able to float down the river and meet the knitting sheep in the bulrushes.