My top 10 favourite books

Prompted by recent tweets I thought I’d draw up a list of my favourite books. I thought about widening beyond fiction, but in the end I’ve gone for the easier option of just favourite fiction books. Note that I’ve excluded “Complete Works” or complete series.

The list is generally not in order apart from the first book in it, which is by far my favourite. This was republished in a single volume soon after publication of the final third, so I think I can include it in its entirety:

• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

I first read this when I was too young to borrow books from the adult section of Hawick Public Library. So my Mum borrowed them for me. It has been a regular reread ever since.

The remaining 9 books are not in any order. They almost look like a best of from many favourite authors, with no author in the list twice. But for each author’s work there is a book I especially cherish. Here they are:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (the first book of that title in the series)
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens – despite my concerns re one particular aspect of the plot. But rereading it every few years is a constant delight.
• Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett – the first in the Watch sub series, and the best for me still.
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny – I reread this every year in the run up to Halloween.
• Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (the second book in the larger 5-book sequence)

That’s a really satisfying set of books for me. All ones that I adore, all ones that I reread with delight. There are many other books that I am extremely fond of. But these are the standout top 10.

I was lucky to do a PhD on historic Scottish reading habits and studied the books that many individual Scots were reading in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But there were virtually no records of individual readers’ favourite books, though it’s quite a common thing to ask nowadays. I think that it can provide an interesting snapshot view of a reader’s interests.

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Evusheld and private versus public healthcare in the UK

Really shocked at the cost of someone else receiving Evusheld privately in the UK, a preventative medicine against Covid to help immunosuppressed patients, many of whom do not generate any antibodies from vaccines. Unlike other countries the UK is not providing this publicly.

A single treatment of Evusheld lasts 6 months. It would cost up to £800 to the NHS but it’s not approved unlike so many other countries. It’s newly approved privately in the UK, and we’d been told £1000. Well someone I know has just got it. And it’s way way more than that.

£500 for consultation with a private doctor, £1600 for the drug, £160 administration. So about £2400, out of someone’s private coffers and that’s I think for just 6 months protection. This drug could save thousands of extremely vulnerable lives. Normal people can’t afford this.

I’m extremely lucky I’m getting some good antibodies, after 6 Covid vaccines (yes 6!). Though Covid vaccines trigger a devastating 3-month long neurological flare for me every single time. But Evusheld would make me feel safer, and protect others far more. Provide it on the NHS now!

Evusheld could be provided on the NHS to patients at considerably less cost per dose than private providers are selling it to patients directly. Yes it has a cost but for 500K people who are not being protected enough by vaccines and still at phenomenal risk it is needed now.

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