One of my favourite activities of the day is bedtime reading with my kids. That’s the time when I can wind down and enjoy a good story or two with them. We laugh, we bond over silly stories and they get to take happy memories to bed too.

I must thank one of my ex-bosses for introducing my daughter to Seuss. Her first encounter with ‘One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish’ was a hit. I guess she was tickled by the funny rhyming prose and outlandish tales of make-believe creatures like the seven-hump wump, the zeds, the gox and other marvellous creations of Seuss.

From there, we progress to ‘The Cat in the Hat’, which comes with a CD-Rom ‘Living Book’, ‘The Lorax’, ‘Horton Hatches the Egg’, ‘There’s a Wocket in my Pocket’, ‘Yertle the Turtle, ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’, ‘The Buttle Battle Book’, ‘And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street’ and many other delightful books. And along with her, I enjoyed the incredibly entertaining stories and relived my childhood once again as I read aloud to her and her little brother … boy, those rhymes can be quite a tongue-twisting challenge some times.

Speaking of book series, one of the series I enjoy reading tremendously is the Bridgerton siblings’ romance series by Julia Quinn. While the Bridgerton books are a loosely connected series, each stands on its own as an individual novel.

The series recounts the romance of the eight Bridgertons (Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory and Hyacinth) and are all highly original and entertaining. I particularly love Lady Whistledown, London’s most elusive and most famous gossip columnist during that time period, the secret identity of witty, kind-hearted bluestocking Penelope Featherington. I was so intrigued that I went on to read two other novellas (‘The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown’ and ‘Lady Whistledown Strikes Back’) that feature Lady Whistledown as the narrator, connecting four stories written by different authors. So it should come as no surprise that ‘Romancing Mr Bridgerton’ is my favourite book in the series …

Have just finished the delightful ’shopaholic’ series by Sophie Kinsella last month, and couldn’t resist picking up her latest — Can you keep a secret? — and finishing it over 3 nights last week.

Yeah, it was that good a page-turner. In the words of Jack Harper, the romantic hero, I was ‘gripped’. (Brief synop: the book’s heroine, Emma, spilled her deep, dark secrets to a stranger on a plane who turned out to be, horror of horrors, her company’s enigmatic and reclusive head honcho who’d decided to spot check the company’s operations in London after a few years of remote control management.)

My love of books has led me to start this blog. The idea has been germinating for quite a while. You see, I love reading. Not just your literary classic and paperback novels, but also romance, historical novels, fantasy, non-fiction, self-help self-improvement, reference books and even dictionaries.

Oh yes, at last count, I own no less than four heavy tomes of dictionaries — just don’t ask me what possessed me to acquire them. I mean, in one’s lifetime, shouldn’t one or two suffice?

Ok … back to the purpose of this blog. I hope to share this love of books with like-minded pals, and I hope you would add to the exchange of ideas and spread the love of books, literature to one and all.