I am a bookshop addict. I cannot walk past a bookshop without taking a peek inside, especially if it is a second hand shop. Second hand book shops have characters, I find. You will not always find the kinds of books that you are interested in reading, but you will inevitably find the kinds of books that the owner is interested in reading and there is something about walking into a secondhand bookshop and browsing the shelves that makes you feel connected to the owner of the shop as well as to the previous owners and future owners of the books. New bookshops do not have the same kind of warmth and character attached to them, but you can still sense something about the shop by perusing through the shelves and noting what they have and, more specifically, what they don't.

When I walk into a bookshop, I do so with a sense of purpose. There are books that I want to read that I have yet to find, and when I walk into a bookshop and start perusing the shelves, I am looking for specific authors, names that I will recognise. When I don't recognise any names, I immediately write that bookshop off my list of possibilites. When I recognise even a name or two, I start to make myself comfortable and peruse the shelves with more ease - I might only know a few of the authors, but there is a sense of visiting some old friends and being introduced to some of their contemporaries.

You might ask where I got the list of books that I look for from, and this is simple enough - it has been built up from years of English books that I neglected to read when I should have and books that have been recommended by friends, but was added to last year during my creative writing course when we were given a list of books longer than anyone would be able to manage in the mere three months that we had to complete the course. Then there are those that I gouge from the internet pages that I read. Internet pages like the one that I stumbled across this morning: "Thirty Books Everyone Should Read Before They're Thirty" (http://www.divinecaroline.com/22189/98450-thirty-books-everyone-read-they-re).

Looking over this list, I realised that I hadn't heard of most of the books and had only read a grand total of four of them. But most of them, upon reading the short descriptions, were ones that I had no interest in in any case! People's tastes are completely subjective, and I know that mine is no different, but I have decided to put together a list of the books that I want to read before I am thirty, compiled from a combination of that list and the creative writing one (excluding the ones sitting on my bookshelf here waiting to be read). And here it is, in alphabetical order, rather than that of preference:

Lara's List of Book She Wants to Read Before She is Thirty

1. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
2. Arundhati Roy - God of Small Things
3. Bernard Schlink - The Reader
4. David Cohen - People Who Have Stolen From Me
5. Ernest Hemingway - For Whom The Bell Tolls
6. Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis
7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
9. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
10. Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain
11. George Orwell - 1984
12. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
13. James Ellmore - The Black Dahlia
14. JM Coetzee - Boyhood
15. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
16. Jonathon Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
17. Jose Saramago - The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
18. Joseph Heller - Catch 22
19. JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
20. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
21. Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt
22. Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
23. Ma Jian - Red Dust
24. Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
25. Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion
26. Michael Ondaatje - Running in the Family
27. Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere
28. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
29. Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari
30. Peter Matthiessen - Snow Leopard
31. Plato - The Republic
32. Primo Levi - If This Be A Man
33. Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
34. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
35. Xiaolu Guo - 20 Fragments of a Revenous Youth
36. Xinran - The Good Women of China

Some of these, like The Lord of the Rings, are ones that I have started reading. Some are ones that are sitting on my shelf back home in South Africa, awaiting my return and itching to be opened. Some I am weary about and some I am confident in. There are many more to be added to this list, but this is just the beginning. You can expect to find it edited over and over again, but never cut down unless one of the books is read. But for now, this is all that I can do. I would like to hear opinions, so feel free to comment!