“Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.” The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

For such a lofty quote, I fear that my earliest book choices didn't so much as sculpt a palace but rather, cobbled together a Barbie mansion

• Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High series
• Ann M Martin's The Babysitters Club
• The entire Sweet Dreams series (my favourite being one where someone dies of cancer, another where someone is broken up with and ends up falling in love with a shorter, emo ginger, and yet another where drama club kids pretend not to like each other)
  • P S I Love You
  • Falling In Love Again
  • Green Eyes
  • Love Match
• Melissa Lowell's Silver Blades series
• Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
• R L Stine horror books
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• C S Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series
• Tamora Pierce's Alannah Series
• L M Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series

Embarrassed and anxious as I am about that list, I have to redeem myself by also including book which I read later in life but have remained in my thoughts

• Zadie Smith's On Beauty
• Alain de Botton's On Love
• Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
• F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• Poems by W H Auden
  • The More Loving One
  • If I Could Tell You
  • Stop All the Clocks (Funeral Blues)
• Amy Jenkins' Funny Valentine
• Melissa Banks' The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing