A Gap In The Clouds

I shalln’t go into why I like these books, because I’m rubbish at all that.

If it hits the spot it’s in, simple as that and this list will be updated as and when something hits that spot 🙂

Last updated – 19th November 2020

Poetry/Plays

1. Betty Hayes Albright – Skipping Stones
2. Enid Blyton – The Enid Blyton Poetry Book
3. A. Carder – Between Dusk and Darkness
4. John F. Cherry – The British Museum Medieval Love Poetry
5. Billy Collins – Sailing Alone Around the Room
6. Bei Dao – Old Snow: Poems
7. Mihai Eminescu – Poems
8. Kellie Elmore – Magic in the Backyard
9. Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet
10. Tom Lowenstein – Classic Haiku: The Greatest Poetry from Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki and Their Followers
11. J. W. Marriott – One Act Plays of Today (play)
12. Christine Moran – Dancing in the Rain
13. George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan (play)
14. Matty Weingast – The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns
15. Sarah Whiteley
    No Direction But Home
    Wandering Wonderful
16.  
17. John Drury – The Poetry Dictionary
18. Stephen Fry – The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
19. Colin Wilson – Poetry and Mysticism: A Question of Inspiration

Books/Writing and Writers

1. Carlos Baker – Hemingway: A Life Story
2. Nicholas A. Basbanes
   A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
   Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perpectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-first Century
3. Dorothea Brande – Becoming a Writer: The Classic Inspirational Guide
4. Lesley Brown – The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: Vol 1 & 2
5. Orson Scott Card – Characters & Viewpoint
6. Lionel Casson – Libraries in the Ancient World
7. G. Elgie Christ – The Nuttall Dictionary of English Synonyms and Antonyms
8. Lawrence Goldstone – Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World
9. Henry Hitchings – Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World
10. Bill Johnson – A Story is a Promise: Good Things to Know Before You Write That Screenplay, Novel, or Play
11. Stephen King – On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
12. Kobold Knight – Plot Digest: Structural, Character, Theme & Motif, Jigsaw, Dream, Pre-writing and General Plot Advice
13. Javier Marías – Written Lives
14. Michael Palin – Hemmingway Adventure: Discover the Man Behind the Legend
15. Madeleine B. Stern & Leona Rostenberg – Old Books, Rare Freinds
16. Christopher Vogler – The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
17. Maurice Waite – Oxford Compact Thesaurus
18. Simon Winchester – The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

Fiction

1. Louisa May Alcott – Little Women
2. Anon – The Arabian Nights: Tales From a Thousand and One Nights (Folio Society 1999)
3. Daisy Ashford – The Young Visitors
4. Brian Bates – The Way of Wyrd
5. H. E. Bates – Love for Lydia
6. Algernon Blackwood
   The Dance of Death
   Tales of the Mysterious and the Macabre
   Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural
7. Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
8. J. M. Callwell – Dorothy Arden
9. Italo Calvino – The Path to the Nest of Spiders
10. Henri Charriere – Papillon
11. Wu Cheng’en – Monkey
12. G. K. Chesterton – The Father Brown Stories
13. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
14. James Clavell – Shogun (et al)
15. Marie Corelli – The Sorrows of Satan
16. Richard Dalby – Dracula’s Brood
17. Lester del Rey – The Scheme of Things
18. John M. del Vecchio – The 13th Valley
19. DM Denton
    A House Near Luccoli
    To A Strange Somewhere Fled
    Without the Veil Between, Anne Brontë: A Fine and Subtle Spirit
20. Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
21. Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
22. E. L.Doctorow – Ragtime
23. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    The Complete Brigadier Gerard
    The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes
    The Conan Doyle Stories
    The Historical Novels Vol I & II
    Sir Nigel
    The Ring of Thoth
    Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle (Green & Gibson)
    The White Company
24. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose
25. John Fowles – The Magus
26. Brian Fox – A Dollar to Die For
27. Michael Hardwick – Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes
28. Mrs Hardy (Janet Gordon) – Ulric Zwingle
29. Thomas Hardy – Far From the Madding Crowd
30. Joanne Harris
    Blackberry Wine
    Chocolat
31. Lian Hearn – Across the Nightingale Floor (et al)
32. Mark Helprin – Winter’s Tale
33. Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha
34. Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
35. K. W. Jeter – Blade Runner (2, 3, 4)
36. Abda Khan – Stained
37. Guy Gavriel Kay – The Fionavar Trilogy
38. Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba the Greek
39. Stephen King
    Cycle of the Werewolf
    It
40. Dean R. Koontz – Anti-Man
41. Elizabeth Kostova – The Historian
42. Laurie Lee – Cider with Rosie
43. H. P. Lovecraft – Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre
44. R. A. Macavoy – The Damiano Trilogy
45. Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
46. Nicholas Meyer – The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
47. Walter Moers
    The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear
    Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
    The City of Dreaming Books
48. Jill Murphy – Peace At Last
49. Katherine Neville
    The Eight
    The Fire
50. Margaret Panofsky – The Last Shade Tree
51. Beatrix Potter – The Fairy Caravan
52. Ray Rigby – The Hill
53. Michael Rosen & Helen Oxenbury – We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
54. Sylvester Stallone – Paradise Alley
55. Olaf Stapledon – Last and First Men
56. John Richard Stephens – Vampires, Wine & Roses
57. J. R. R. Tolkien
    The Hobbit
    Lord of the Rings
58. Martin Waddell & Patrick Benson – Owl Babies
59. D. J. Watkins-Pitchford, ‘BB’ – The Wizard of Boland
60. Andy Weir – The Martian
61. Dennis Wheatley – The Ka of Gifford Hillary
62. E. B. White – Charlotte’s Web
63. T. H. White – The Once and Future King (The complete edition)
64. Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray
65. Chelsea Quinn Yabro – Hotel Transylvania

Non-Fiction

1. Geoffrey Abbott – Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers: A History of Torture and its Instruments
2. Karen Armstrong – Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
3. Mike Ashley – Adventures in the Strand: Arthur Conan Doyle & The Strand Magazine
4. Josef. F. Blumrich – The Spaceships of Ezekiel: Was Earth Once Visited by Beings From Another Planet?
5. Marie-France Boyer – Tree-Talk: Memories, Myths and Timeless Customs
6. Frank Brady – Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy
7. Katherine M. Briggs
   A Dictionary of Fairies
   The Fairies in Tradition and Literature
8. Joseph Campbell
   The Masks of God #1: Primitive Mythology
   Myths to Live By: Mythology of Our Time
9. Philip Carr-Gomm – The Book of English Magic
10. Jung Chang – Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
11. Kate Cooper – Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Christian Women
12. Brad Darrach – Bobby Fischer vs The Rest of the World: Biography
13. Paul Davis – Are We Alone?: Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life
14. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure
    Essays on Photography: The Unknown Conan Doyle (Green & Gibson)
    Through the Magic Door
    The Wanderings of a Spiritualist
15. Martin Ebon – They Knew the Unknown: Fascinating Case-studies of Famous Men and Women in History Who Explored the Reality Beyond Our Senses
16. Bobby Fischer – Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
17. Jane Gifford – The Celtic Wisdom of Trees
18. Daisy Goodwin – Victoria
19. John Richard Green – A Short History of the English People Vol 1 & 2
20. Joel F. Harrington – The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death in the Sixteenth Century
21. Charles Higham – The Adventures of Conan Doyle
22. Garry Kasparov – How Life Imitates Chess: Insights Into Life as a Game of Strategy
23. Gary Valentine Lachman
    Caretakers of the Cosmos
    Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius
24. P. A. Lester – Sherlock Holmes in The Midlands
25. Primo Levi – If This is a Man / The Truce
26. Anna Lewington – Ancient Trees: Trees that Live for a Thousand Years
27. Robert Macfarlane – Underland: A Deep Time Journey
28. Brian Masters – The Evil That Men Do: From Saints to Serial Killers – Penetrating the Nature of Good and Evil
29. Caro Ness – A Space for Silence
30. Scott Allen Nollen – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema
31. Thomas Pakenham – Meetings with Remarkable Trees
32. Massimo Polidoro – Final Seance: The Strange Freindship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle
33. Diane Purkiss – Troublesome Things
34. Ken Radford – Tales of Witches and Sorcery
35. Jacqueline Simpson –  British Dragons
36. Cheryl Strayed – Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
37. Whitley Strieber
    Communion: A True Story – Encounters With the Unknown
    Transformation: The Breakthrough
38. Maria Tatar – The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales
39. Dylan Thomas – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog: Autobiography
40. Fred Waitzkin – Searching for Bobby Fischer
41. Colin Wilson
    The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries: Exploring the Astonishing Variety of Unsolved Riddles and Enigmas