For the moment, this is just a small list of my favourite books.
This is by no means an exhaustive list nor is definitive -
it is merely some of my favourites which have popped up in my
head while I am writing this. I have purposely not made it canonical
- these aren't books that you must read, but books that you may
very much enjoy. My list of poets, on the other hand, has canonical
tendencies but that is because in my mind, very few people have
written truly memorable peoms
I have included links to amazon.co.uk where I can in case you're
interested in something but are unable to find a copy or are too
busy to do so.
For those of you out there who don't really do the internet
shopping thing, these links are still helpful. They are often
to my recommended version (where it's available) which I can be
fussy about, and the author link leads you to a list of his/her
works published and available - this is also useful if you don't
agree with my version choice, or you want to check out if there
is something cheaper (there usually are but unfortanately most
cheap versions are inferior in terms of editing, paper and production
value- excluding Oxford's Worlds Classics range which is very
good unless you want the Count of Monte Cristo in which case the
print is so small it's illegible).
If the book is unavailable at amazon.co.uk, I will do my best
to try and find alternative sources. However, some of these books
are out of print and therefore the best I can do is give you the
details and you'll have to keep an eye out at your favourite second
hand book store!
Sometimes I may actually prefer an American version (pretty
rare, it's usually the other way round), in this case I will offer
it as an alternative link.
Please feel free to offer your own opinions on the books listed,
fill out the form below and I will add a link to it.
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- Michael Ondaatije - In the Skin of the Lion
- This is the prequel to the rather more famous The
English Patient, however despite the latter's success In
the Skin of the Lion is the better book. It is based in Canada,
when the country was still young and growing using as fuel the
poor and migrants. This has to be close to one of the best I
have ever read, indeed, I cannot say that I have enjoyed another
more. The writing itself is exquisite, Ondaatje writes prose
as if it were poetry (he is also an accomplished poet) - the
beauty in the language itself is reason enough to enjoy the book.
But it is the book's overwhelming sense of humanity that is for
me makes this book what it is. This book is about people, their
stories, their tragedies and their ability to love. The book
envelops you in its slightly dreamy, warm human haze while you
read it and long after you've finished. I once broke up with
someone because he refused to read it (it's actually a long story).
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- "One of the great books of modern literature."
Many people tend to toss this away because of the belief that
it is overly intellectual. It can be, it can last an entire lifetime
in study, the references are obscure and dense. However, when
I read it, my edition (Penguin) had no footnotes so I either
got it then or I didn't. Strangely enough, this was a benefit,
instead of stopping every few paragraphs I was forced into just
reading it. After a while (though the style kept constantly changing)
I began not to worry if I didn't understand, I just read - an
amazing thing happened, my reading became subliminal in that
I was training my conscious mind to relax and just read as if
the words were just patterns of sound. Then things started making
some sense and the power of the language became evident. Of course,
to read it properly you do need an adequate reading guide (I
recommend the notes at the back of the World Classics edition
or the very good The
New Bloomsday Book : A Guide Through Ulysses
by Harry Blamires) but from time to time I would suggest just
trying to read it alone (if you want, you can read a summary
of the chapter before: it doesn't really affect the book) and
OUT ALOUD (believe it makes more sense out it that way). Like
In the Skin of the Lion, is the sense of humanity that endears
it to me. Once the heiroglyphics are peeled away, one of Joyce's
greatest talents is displayed: his irony and that sense of humanity.
He is one of the few authors that can pay out their creations
brilliantly, yet at the same time treat (those worthy) them with
gentleness and understanding.
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- Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
- One of the funniest books I've ever read from one of Ireland's
best writers. It is strange that he is not popularly known outside
of his country, and since he is long dead I doubt there will
be any resurgence in the near future so all the more reason to
give this recommendation! Like Beckett he had connections to
Joyce, I think that Joyce was his patron for a short time (seeing
his obvious talent), however, when comparisons with Joyce's style
surfaced (albeit in praise) on publication of O'Brien's novel,
O'Brien distanced himself from both the book and Joyce. Strangely
enough he professed to be not so impressed with At Swim-Two-Birds
ever after. Ignore him, this is clearly one of if not the best
book of his literary career. It is a book within a book within
a book, it can be quite surreal as tales intertwine frequently.
Those who are at/have been to university will find this particularly
amusing seeing the protagonist is a lazy apathetic student who
spends most of his time in his bed while being hacked on by his
uncle. The humour is very much Irish, underplayed and farcical
- if you ever find, read it!
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- Iris Murdoch - A Severed Head
- I was going to stop reading this, the first few chapters
annoyed the hell out of me. It is about this bunch of wealthy
arty blarty narcissists who live in the trendier parts of London
in the 60s (when it was written) going through mid-life crises.
Fun! I was going to stop but a friend of mine said it was one
of his favourite books. Sure, it was a bit ho hum in the beginning
but weird things start happening, and the classical allusions
start to really fly. Really very interesting little plot.
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- Donna Tartt - The Secret History
- I turned up for a poetry meeting we'd organised and no one
was there except my fellow co-host and some tortured looking
first year in a leather jacket, black jeans and boots. I can't
remember what he said about whoever it was we were discussing,
he mentioned that this was his favourite book as he read it to
death when he was living in England (I think that was it). As
these things happened, as soon as he'd mentioned it, I saw the
thing everywhere and it was even on some bookstore's list of
best books. So I had to buy it. It was extremely distracting
from the thesis I was supposed to be doing. What was bizarre
was it reminded me of a little group in my own faculty. Perhaps
if you attended an old university, you'd know what I meant. A
small priviledged group who were intelligent yet cruelly childish
from too many private school and college (in the States I think
they're referred to as Fraternities and Sororities - thank god
we haven't yet a system so developpedly complex and base) pranks.
Of course, they didn't commit murder like this little erudite
mystery. Still, sick and repulsive as they are, there's something
compelling about their incestuous elitist little world - as is
the world of the classics that this book so heavily draws on.
I wouldn't be surprised if the enrolments in that department
hadn't suddenly risen on account of this novel's release.
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- Marguerite Duras - The Lover
- The most intense book I have ever read. At the time I thought
I was going through a similar relationship to one in another
of her books, Black Hair Blue Eyes. It doesn't take very long
to read and its best in just one sitting. In a rare occassion,
I've recommended the American version because of the cover. I
hate the new English cover, a couple of years ago, I wanted to
buy it for a friend and almost screamed when I saw it. The woman
is hideous, the old cover was exactly the same only it had the
rather more sublime picture on the American cover. I don't know
if that is Duras but it certainly looks more like her than the
indie scrag on the new one. Of course my friend loved the indie
scrag but there's no accounting for taste...
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- Lawrence Block - The Burglar who Painted like Mondrian
- Continuing covers, don't even look at the American versions
of this. On one side of the Atlantic we have some of the most
inspired but simply beautiful covers I've ever seen and on the
other, well, the cat bringing up its dinner comes to mind. You
see I would never have read a Burglar story had they been American
covers. I was at a second hand book store with a friend from
England. I was waiting at the counter because he had bought something
and then a noticed a pile of books (all Burglar stories) on the
counter. Then my friend said he'd read two, this and The Burglar
who Thought he was Bogart (also bloody brilliant) and he was
really rather good. I looked at the artwork, great photographs
nice fifties schlocky font - and the rest they say is history.
I only choose one that day though, this one. He gave me the Bogey
one after, then I read a few more. But this and the Bogey ones
are the best. It's about a Greenwich village second hand bookstore
owner who is also a great burglar who also gets set up a lot
and then has to solve the mystery to get out of it. Got it? His
best friend is a sardonic lesbian midget who loves cats (no,
she's quite cool actually). In fact they are both cool
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- Lee Tulloch - Fabulous Nobodies
- When it came out, it did receive considerable publicity (or
maybe just in the fashion rags) but hardly anyone has heard of
it now, which is a shame. It's a great little book by one of
my favourite fashion magazine (Vogue and Harpers not Seventeen)
writers, Lee Tulloch. She is of course from Melbourne (I've yet
to find a female Sydney writer I admire and I'm actually from
Sydney), home of what I believe are the most stylish women who
still manage to remain real. Someone borrowed my copy and hasn't
returned it yet so I can't give you character names but it is
a bit of a Cinderella story but it's based in New York night
clubs and fashion haunts. I orginally didn't read it because
I thought it would be pretentious, but thankfully it wasn't.
It was fun and feel good and it's cool too. Perhaps you'll see
a bit of yourself in the heroine and a little bit of your best
friend/worst enemy in her Audrey Hepburn lookalike companion.
A bit like Edwina and Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous with out the
money, the age and the superficiality. While they might be somebodies,
it's actually the Nobodies of the book that are way more Fabulous.
- It's presently out of print (I picked up my copy for $1 at
a library sale which was good seeing that I was prepared to buy
it hardback and new) but you can still order it, it just might
take a while. Meanwhile, she has a new book out called Wraith.
It doesn't look half as good as Fabulous Nobodies though.
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- Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile
- Ok so I might be a dag, and I imagine, this doesn't do much
for my literary credibility but I love Agatha Christie. I've
just finished reading At the Flood which is just perfectly brilliant
and not as predictable as maybe some others. Be that as it may,
my favourite Agatha Christies are those she wrote in the 1920s
and 30s. There's a romance in those novels that is lost with
the coming of WWII when her novels become decidedly more seedy.
Death on the Nile is no exception. the atmosphere is brilliant.
I guess I partly like them because they are relics of a lost
era, the same nostagia that makes me watch Indiana Jones movies.
When I think of the 20s and 30s there are three things that come
to mind usually: the scene in the Great Gatsby where the women
in white dresses appear to float like angels, Baz Lurhman's Opera
Australia production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's
Dream set in 20s Colonial India, and Agatha Christie novels.
But they are also great detective novels.
- Order Book from Amazon.co.uk... Author
info... read review...
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- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- He was a shocking poet but he could write more than just
witty repartees and amusing farce, the proof of which is in this
book. I remember reading this at fifteen and my world falling
apart. It did that day. It's strange to think that Oscar Wilde
could profoundly change your outlook on life, but he did. Perhaps
at a much more cynical 23 it wouldn't have much effect but then
much of my thought was crystallising at fifteen. I think what
was so earth shattering was the resulting self-reflection. The
story is about a beautiful young man who when he has a painting
made of him one day ceases to ages, instead the portrait does.
In fact the portrait does more than age but shows up the signs
of the concurrent moral degradation as well. The criticism of
Dorian Gray I laid upon myself, I questioned my previous assumptions
and well started to develop some huge hang ups... no, seriously,
it was good as I tried to stop taking my own righteousness for
granted and actually examined my motives for things that I did.
Not all was pretty, much like the portrait. I once gave it to
a boyfriend to read and told him he should see things about himself
in the novel. He didn't, I hope you have better success if you
read it (or maybe everyone's just perfect....).
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- James - The Wings of the Dove
- His writing is pure sex. I almost hated him although he gave
me nice tutorial brownie points on the Spoils of Poynton and
the Aspern Papers once, I was made to read over 500 pages of
The Ambassadors when I had an eye infection and it consequently
gave me the worst mark of my Honours year. However, after I had
written the pig awful essay, his brilliance was suddenly revealed
to me. It was true as my lecturer said, it's not like other writers
where you may have to read the book twice to understand its real
meaning, with James you had to read each sentence twice to gather
what he's literally saying. That was the beauty, his language
was the beauty. It was so dense and complex but it was at the
same time so cryptic and so liberating. He says so much by saying
very little in very long sentences. It's wonderful! I saw the
movie and three paragraphs of the novel capture the main characters
just as much as the movie failed to. James' genius is that he
says everything through implication. Characters are implied as
well as described, they are shaded in a way that a straightforward
presentation could not produce. I used to just read a page of
Wings of the Dove at the bus stop and I'd get chills down my
spine, his appreciation of sexual tension is latent in almost
all his sentences, it's bound up in the syntax, the words, the
unsaid, the tone... oh my... Of course though it's tragic, I
hate tragedies but unfortunately you can't have writing this
powerful without tragedy.
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- Henry Green - Party Going
- For some reason this is hard to find, and is only available
in some dreadful three book collection. I hate that, anthologies
are bearable but I think books should be read separately as they
were published originally (alright we can't read Dickens or Dostoyevsky
in serial form anymore, but you know what I mean). I'm still
waiting until I find all the books of Proust's Rembrance of Things
Gone By, I have most (but not the first) of a fairly popular
sixties edition..
- My copy is a Harvill one and has as its cover a lovely painting
by Whisler of the sea and boats - it's actually just washes of
green, blue, grey and white paint, but it is wonderful. Terribly
soothing, it's good then that the contents do justice to its
cover. It's about a party of young fashionable things (20s/30s)
who get stuck in a hotel when fog means that there train cannot
leave the station. It's abstract written from the viewpoint of
each of the different characters without sympathising with any,
almost like an impressionist painting. In fact if writers do
attempt to write like painters, I think Henry Green is one of
the few who has succeeded. The book goes nowhere as do the characters,
even the imagery doesn't seem to mean anything solid, it's as
if everything is as foggy as the weather. It's brilliant, I read
this at a time when I was frustrated with English speaking writers,
but this is something else. I think on the blurb and elsewhere
he's often described as a writer's writer. That's understandable,
but from a reading point of view, if you feel like going to an
art gallery don't bother. Stay home and read this, the memory
of it will amount to the same thing.
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- Grahame Greene - The Quiet American
- I don't recommend Grahame Greene in general, although I don't
not recommend him, it's just that the Quiet American is not your
usual Greene book. It is beautiful. It's set in Vietnam before
the war but when things are starting to look funny. The atmosphere
is beautiful and the story is in part a romance. The narrator
is a Brittish journo and he is involved in a love triangle with
a young American over a beautiful Vietnamese girl. However, this
is Greene, so of course everything is complicated by the fact
that no one is truly good, no one's motives can be trusted -
yet this doesn't make the characters hateful just more complex.
The most fascinating is the young Vietnamese girl, denied a voice
due to ignorance of English and small knowledge of French, yet
one has to question is she really being exploited or is she the
one with the power. Our intrepid journo quotes a poem by Beaudelaire
"L'invitation au Voyage" about her. That is reason
enough I think to read it.
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- Natalia Ginsberg - The City and the House
- She is one of Italy's foremost female writers so it's strange
that her books are very difficult to obtain. The only English
translations I can find are second hand. I'm taking up Italian,
if only just to read more of her novels. Her writing is pure
sex, her characterisation is brilliant and her portrayal of human
interaction is brilliant. If you ever see a copy of one of her
novels, buy it! If not for yourself, I'll buy it off you. I can't
recommend her enough.
- Order Book from ?... Author info... read review...
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- Antonio Lobos Antunes - South of Nowhere
- Given to me by an ex but still a friend, he'll kill me for
recommending this, oh well. It's by a Portuguese writer who was
once very sexy when he was young but it not so at all anymore.
A little story about despair. I won't recommend it anymore or
else someone will get angry at me. Of course like all good books,
it's out of print, but at least it's listed so you might get
it if you wait long enough.
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- Mario Vargas Llosa - Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
- Funny, clever and very well written. It was somewhat based
on Mario's real life.
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- EM Forster - Room with a View
- His writing is quite on the other side of James. It is stunningly
beautiful, but because it flows like water, paint or whatever
you can think of. When I was younger I used to read bits of A
Passage to India out aloud not paying attention to the plot but
just because I loved how it sounded. Maurice (also partly autobiographical)
is wonderful, but it is this, Room with a View, which is my first
and favourite Forster novel. Sorry, but it really is one of the
most romantic novels I have ever read. Unfortunately, Forster
did write an epilogue to it entitled "A Room without a View"
which was probably necessary or else young girls would have gone
off and followed penniless young men to live in Florence. Ah....
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- Ford Maddox Ford - The Good Soldier
- A bit like James and Henry Green in that things are hazy,
misunderstood and people take advantage of other's ignorance.
This is a classic of Modernist literature, but it's a good novel
nonetheless (actually, I do like Modernism). I don't really want
to describe the story, it's a bit of a cliffhanger.
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- Margery Williams- The Velveteen Rabbit
- The story that made me believe toys were real. I still can't
throw a toy away because of this even though I have a lot of
broken toys. Every child must read this if they are to experience
the wonders of imagination. And adults should rekindle that hope
that if you wished hard enough it would happen that they might
have possessed as a child. I had a letter published in Neil Gaiman's
Sandman because of this book.
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- Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night, a Traveller. . .
- A book about reading for readers. I had stopped reading for
years (except English books of course but even there I was as
slack as I could be) and it was this that made me love reading
again, turned me back into what I always was, a reader. If it
was for this book, I wouldn't have done English Honours. Maybe
that would have been a good thing... If you've never read Calvino
before, you must as he is wonderful.. Small warning, if you don't
care much about theory and actually examining reading and translation
and the process of creation you won't like it. However, if you
enjoy reading not only because of the plot (which this book has
plenty of) but because of the language possibilities and stimulus
for thought then you should love it.
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