Here are some books well worth reading
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
(1876) always compared unfavourably to Huck Finn, nevertheless funny and sharp, as well as energetic and charming.
Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog
(2006) spiky, funny and fresh.
Christine Dwyer Hickey's Carry Me Down
(2011) a wonderful novel that sticks in the memory.
Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin
(2009) a 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.
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop
the 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. Her 2014 novel The Paying Guests is also the work of a major writer, and a compelling read.
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 The Next Step in the Dance
a unique, humane novel: compelling and intensely involving, and makes most Louisiana-set stuff seem hokey; it's also a love story lightyears from Chick Lit.
George Eliot's Middlemarch
the greatest novel I've ever read... and re-read... and I look forward to reading it one more time before I die...
Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
in delirious contrast, another kind of classic: scabrously funny, vivid, inspired: essential reading about America.
a unique, humane novel: compelling and intensely involving, and makes most Louisiana-set stuff seem hokey; it's also a love story lightyears from Chick Lit.
George Eliot's Middlemarch
the greatest novel I've ever read... and re-read... and I look forward to reading it one more time before I die...
Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
in delirious contrast, another kind of classic: scabrously funny, vivid, inspired: essential reading about America.
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
a far more multi-layered, admirable achievement than the film.
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 book ought to be as well-known and well-regarded as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It's a wonderful, wonderful novel.
John Reynolds' long-researched biography Lead Belly
draws on private material supplied by the great songster & 12-string guitarist's family; John Reynolds is the man who rescued the classic 1920s studio shot of Blind Willie McTell from a garbage pile outside a magazine's office over 50 years ago.
Geoffrey Ward's 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. (There is a film by Ken Burns, based on the book and sharing its title.)
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.
a far more multi-layered, admirable achievement than the film.
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 book ought to be as well-known and well-regarded as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It's a wonderful, wonderful novel.
John Reynolds' long-researched biography Lead Belly
draws on private material supplied by the great songster & 12-string guitarist's family; John Reynolds is the man who rescued the classic 1920s studio shot of Blind Willie McTell from a garbage pile outside a magazine's office over 50 years ago.
Geoffrey Ward's 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. (There is a film by Ken Burns, based on the book and sharing its title.)
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.
One Day, by David Nicholls,
became an outstanding word-of-mouth-made 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 so strongly urged upon me that I did read it... and 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've made an insipid film of it. Read the book. I'd also recommend his bleak, hilarious novel about London and luvvies, The Understudy, and his uncanny recreation of English lower-middle-class transition from school to college life in the 1980s, Starter For Ten.
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room
is so well written, with such an unstrained combination of intelligence and 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.
Hilary Mantel, one of contemporary British literature's undoubted greats, came to prominence because her masterly Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize; I want to urge on you not only that and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, but her much earlier yet 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.
Kathryn Stockett's The Help
is, despite its occasional small flaws, a tremendous novel (made into a very poor film), and 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.
became an outstanding word-of-mouth-made 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 so strongly urged upon me that I did read it... and 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've made an insipid film of it. Read the book. I'd also recommend his bleak, hilarious novel about London and luvvies, The Understudy, and his uncanny recreation of English lower-middle-class transition from school to college life in the 1980s, Starter For Ten.
Adam Nicolson's Sea Room
is so well written, with such an unstrained combination of intelligence and 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.
Hilary Mantel, one of contemporary British literature's undoubted greats, came to prominence because her masterly Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize; I want to urge on you not only that and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, but her much earlier yet 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.
Kathryn Stockett's The Help
is, despite its occasional small flaws, a tremendous novel (made into a very poor film), and 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.
