The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), 1884, 251 pages.

Genre: adventure, American lit, classic, humour

Basic Overview: Huckleberry Finn, friend of Tom Sawyer, leaves his Missouri home to escape his drunken, abusive father, and heads downriver on the Mississippi, having many adventures along the way. His companion on the journey is Jim, a runaway slave, whom Huck tries his best to protect. 

Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton, 1955, 200 pages.

Genre: international, fiction

Basic Overview: The novel tells of Pieter van Vlaanderen, lieutenant in the South African police force, beset by illegal temptation, and his struggles with his yearnings, his family, and his faith. The theme of apartheid in general and the treatment of one particular black woman in specific provide a background for this story.

The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell, 1961, 217 pages.

Genre: animals, non-fiction, British, adventure

Basic Overview: Naturalist and owner of his own zoo on the Channel Island of Jersey, Gerald Durrell, accompanied by his wife Jacquie, make an animal-collecting and filming trip to Argentina, where they encounter seals, penguins, guanacos, peccaries, and rather magnificently do not manage to encounter any vampire bats, despite the author’s baiting the trap with his own big toe.

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, 1998, 346 pages.

Genre: short stories, poetry, fantasy, British

 Basic Overview: Gaiman’s subjects are varied – his stories are about H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional New England town, about Lucifer in Los Angeles, wholesale contract killers, Penthouse magazine, teenage fans of Michael Moorcock and their fantasy lives, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the Holy Grail, to name a few subjects in Gaiman’s anthology.

 Such an easy answer! My looks. 

I have, for most of my life, hated my appearance. My mum was a late-bloomer, and so was I, and it didn't help that I skipped two grades and started highschool when I was 12 instead of 14 so that my body was still a child's when other girls were becoming young women. I was a stick insect then. Other things that didn't help were my extremely poor eyesight which required me to wear glasses with coke-bottle lenses [thank god for the ultra-thin polycarbonites of today!], the braces on my teeth, and the fact that my parents refused to allow me to wear blue jeans, which were basically the school uniform of the 1970s. Add to that a school full of mean-spirited kids, an emotionally-abusive mother, and a sensitive soul, and you have all the makings of a girl totally insecure about her appearance.

The summer before I went to grade 13, I got contact lenses, and got the braces off my teeth. My father's sister talked to my mother and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing, sending me to highschool in homemade clothes, and dragged her to the store and bought me blue jeans - two pair! After that wake-up call, my mother made sure I was dressed stylishly, and bought me makeup and had my hair done nicely. Now I looked good and I knew it. I was 16 and the only problem was that boys wanted to touch me and I just wasn't ready. So even then I hated my appearance.

The only time I have been really happy with my appearance is between my first and second marriage. Randy as hell, slim, beautiful [yes, I can say it about myself], I moved to the big city, and every other weekend and every Tuesday night I had a home to myself. I knew I looked good and I wanted men to notice. In the space of a year and a half I only went home with two of them, and I married the second one. 

Now I'm fat, and homely and I hate my looks again. Will the self-torment ever stop? I wonder.