Here are some books well worth reading
I confess that if you're inspired to buy any of these books by clicking through to Amazon from here, I shall receive a very, very small amount of money from the Amazonians in the fullness of time.
Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin (2009) is a really riveting book about a clutch of separate New York City characters who come together through a series of exceptional events. It is a highly imaginative yet hard-headed, vivid novel that made my heart pound as I read it. Demobbed is a dispassionate look at how hard it was for men & women to fit back together after the 2nd World War. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is a classic satire about the newspaper industry, and very funny. Sarah Waters wasn't born until 1966 but she has written several of the most distictive novels of recent decades. I think Fingersmith is her very best: a thrilling & highly ingenious plot and a brilliant evocation of place. Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began was written near the end of his life, and therefore covers a great sweep of time as he looks back over a career of folkloric fieldwork and draws on many interviews with musicians & others. It is also beautifully written, confidently un-PC prose.
Tim Gautreaux's unique, humane novel is compelling, intensely involving, and makes most Louisiana-set stuff seem hokey; it's also a love story lightyears from Chick Lit. George Eliot's Middlemarch is the greatest novel I've ever read... and re-read... and I look forward to reading it again... In delirious contrast, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another kind of classic: scabrously funny, vivid, inspired: essential reading about America.
You might have seen the film of Cold Mountain but that's no substitute for the book, which is a far more multi-layered, admirable achievement. If Charles Frazier's novel enriches the literature of the American Civil War, then Josephine Johnson's Now In November is a crucial addition to the literature of the Great Depression. Famous for 15 minutes when it was new, this precociously young novelist's long-forgotten novel ought to be as well-known and well-regarded as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. The recently-publlished, long-researched biography Lead Belly draws on private material supplied by the great songter & 12-string guitarist's family and is assembled by John Reynolds: the man who rescued the classic 1920s studio shot of Blind Willie McTell from a garbage pile outside a magazine's office 50 years ago. Unforgiveable Blackness: the Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is a compelling biography of the first black heavyweight champion: a story as much about the appalling racism of the time as about this quirky, extraordinary figure. Richard Powers' The Echo Maker is a genuinely unforgettable contemporary novel that makes a gripping mystery from both action and the precariousness of the human mind.
Some notable books about Bob Dylan, including my own.
One Day, by David Nicholls, has become an outstanding word-of-mouth success - and rightly so. I didn't read it for many months after it came into the house, because the cover was so bloody awful; then I didn't read it because I thought it was Chic Lit. It was passed around the family and eventually it was so strongly urged upon me that I read it. I absolutely loved and admired it. Perhaps comparisons of this sort are unhelpful but on this evidence Nicholls is a writer who wipes the floor with, say, Nick Hornby or Tony Parsons. It's richly humane, funny, and above all highly accurate about growing up, and resisting growing up, from youth into adulthood. It also contains a dramatic moment that has people shouting "NO!" out loud in public places. Never mind that they're making an Americanised film of it. Read the book. (Nicholls also has a highly engaging website at www.davidnichollswriter.com.)
Sea Room is so well written, with such an unstrained combination of intelligence and gloriously acute, observant prose, that even if you don't think you'll appreciate several hundred pages about a cluster of three unpopulated small islands off the coast of Scotland, you probably will. (Adam Nicolson is also the author of a book about the King James Bible that I hope to read very soon.)
Hilary Mantel, one of contemporary British literature's undoubted greats, has come to recent greater prominence because her masterly Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize - but I want to urge on you her much earlier but equally big historical novel A Place of Greater Safety, which brings to vivid life not just the grand sweep but the great individuals of the French Revolution.
Now more famous as a film (which I haven't seen) Kathryn Stockett's The Help is, despite its occasional small flaws, a tremendous novel - the best thing I've read since One Day, and, like that, a book I had to eke out as the last fifty pages or so hove into view, to put off coming to the end. It shows, through a keen ear for black US Southern speech, and with a wealth of creative detail - derived from compassion and empathy, not Creative Writing School formulae - the world black domestic servants had to endure in the first half of the 20th Century. Set in Jackson MS, this terrific book speaks for, among others, the rest of Blind Willie McTell's family, depicting with great respect as well as humour, the terrible restraints he escaped but they didn't. Impossible, reading this, not to think all over again about Willie's mother Minnie and her life in the kitchen of a white Statesboro GA family. (The last two clickable boxes above are for e-editions.)
Sea Room is so well written, with such an unstrained combination of intelligence and gloriously acute, observant prose, that even if you don't think you'll appreciate several hundred pages about a cluster of three unpopulated small islands off the coast of Scotland, you probably will. (Adam Nicolson is also the author of a book about the King James Bible that I hope to read very soon.)
Hilary Mantel, one of contemporary British literature's undoubted greats, has come to recent greater prominence because her masterly Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize - but I want to urge on you her much earlier but equally big historical novel A Place of Greater Safety, which brings to vivid life not just the grand sweep but the great individuals of the French Revolution.
Now more famous as a film (which I haven't seen) Kathryn Stockett's The Help is, despite its occasional small flaws, a tremendous novel - the best thing I've read since One Day, and, like that, a book I had to eke out as the last fifty pages or so hove into view, to put off coming to the end. It shows, through a keen ear for black US Southern speech, and with a wealth of creative detail - derived from compassion and empathy, not Creative Writing School formulae - the world black domestic servants had to endure in the first half of the 20th Century. Set in Jackson MS, this terrific book speaks for, among others, the rest of Blind Willie McTell's family, depicting with great respect as well as humour, the terrible restraints he escaped but they didn't. Impossible, reading this, not to think all over again about Willie's mother Minnie and her life in the kitchen of a white Statesboro GA family. (The last two clickable boxes above are for e-editions.)
