What are you reading?
Jeannie's Hunter
Sent from Jeannie's iPad
glenc
Shaun Finnie
SPOILER ALERT!!!! (Don’t read on if you’ve not read the book or seen the film)
Claire Hawes
The publication of the latest Booker (or whatever it is now) list hasn't really set me on fire although I'm intrigued by "We need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo - great title and author's name, and it is decribed as "joyous". I feel the need for something joyous to read as the nights draw in!
Fiona
I must go to WHSmith tomorrow and get the £2.99 book with The Times - a Sebastian Faulks that I haven't read.
Jeannie's Hunter
Sent from Jeannie's iPad
> I loved Life if Pi, Shaun. Someone chose it for our book group (in the days when we actually read books) otherwise I wouldn't have looked twice at it.
>
> I must go to WHSmith tomorrow and get the £2.99 book with The Times - a Sebastian Faulks that I haven't read.
>
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Jules
There was another list in The Times yesterday of the 25 books one 'should' have read in a kind of history of literature way. Really interesting. When I am at the Mac, I will see if I can copy it in. I know it starts with The Illyad and ends with The handmaiden (Atwood)... Not read the latter but it's been rattling around my 'should read list' for a while - perhaps that one will come next for me.
Shaun Finnie
already.
:-)
Shaun
-----
Fiona
I remember being into Margaret Attwood years ago - A Handmaid's Tale seemed so shocking to me that it's firmly lodged in my memory!
Lesley Martin
Princess of York? Oh no - that's one I've missed! I loved all the other Philippa Gregory books so I must complete the set.
I remember being into Margaret Attwood years ago - A Handmaid's Tale seemed so shocking to me that it's firmly lodged in my memory!
Jules
Our quick guides to everything you should know about culture. Day 2 — 25 books that changed the course of literature
1. The Iliad
8th century BC
“Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilles.” These are the first words ofThe Iliad . . . and of Western literature. The Iliad is often said to be a poem by Homer about the Trojan War. Neither point is strictly true. It is not by any one man but was composed orally then written down in the eighth century. Nor is it a start-at-the-beginning-and-end-at-the-end tale of the war. It misses out what many think of as the Trojan stories. Helen, its cause, gets only a mention. Achilles’ famous heel and the Trojan Horse don’t even get that. Instead it tells of a single brilliant, arrogant warrior, Achilles (whose ankle seems to be just fine) and his rage at the death of his comrade Patroclus. Homer or no Homer, its influence was immense. In Ancient Greece and Rome, no man could call himself educated unless he had read it. The same was still true in 20th-century England when a classical education was the mark of a gentleman (to the dismay of many; as George Orwell said, “I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”). As a result, The Iliad influenced writers from Virgil to Milton and James Joyce. Homer may have gone. The poem remained. Western literature had begun.
What to say: The original bromance — and, 2,800 years on, still the best
2. Beowulf
10th Century
Many translators have tried to capture the essence of this, the first keystone of English literature — but perhaps Ray Winstone most neatly summed it up, in the 2007 film adaptation: “I am Beowulf, and I am here to kill your monster.” This epic poem (by an unknown author, dated to the 10th century or earlier) is set among the terrorised tribes of Scandinavia and recounts three battles fought by the hero Beowulf: against the “grimma gaést” (demon) Grendel, then Grendel’s aggrieved mother, and, 50 years later, a dragon, who finishes the ageing Beowulf off. For most of us the original Anglo-Saxon text looks alien — somewhere between Danish and Tolkienese — but it contains the rough, monosyllabic building blocks of English (blood, brother, make, axe), as it was before the Latin-derived Romance languages prettied it up. Luckily we have modern translations such as Seamus Heaney’s to convince us of the relevance of this poem, in which a recently-converted Christian people considers the dramatic exploits of their pagan forebears. In the Germanic warriors’ sense of good and evil, loyalty and fate (“wyrd”), natural wonders and horrors, they saw the hand of God. In the insular Beowulf society’s battle against what it sees as a monstrous axis of evil, we perhaps see something of our own.
What to say: The original war on terror
3. La commedia
Dante Alighieri, 1321
Dante Alighieri’s triptych has left its sulphurous footprints across centuries of European culture, inspiring anyone and everyone from Liszt to T.S. Eliot, Botticelli to Dan Brown. In the most recent series of Mad Men, even the complicated Don Draper was seen leafing through Inferno on the beach in Hawaii. The epic poem works on several levels. It’s a love song to the beautiful but unobtainable Beatrice, a howl of political protest (Dante wrote it in exile from his native Florence) and a triumphant summation of medieval theology. In the first canto of Inferno we meet Dante himself, abandoned, despairing, “lost in a dark wood”: the Comedy is his own personal journey, from Hell, where he eventually encounters Satan himself, to Purgatory, where he is cleansed of his sins, to Paradise, where divinity is finally explained. By the time you reach Purgatory it’s easy to get lost in footnotes referencing anyone who’s anyone in medieval scholasticism, but stick to the music of the poetry (a dual translation is a must) and you can’t go wrong. The journey is worth it, for Dante finishes this celestial voyage to discover what really makes the Universe happen: “Love, which moves the sun and the stars”.
What to say: Don’t abandon hope, all ye who enter here
4. The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer, 14th century
The first great English book that can be read without recourse to a dusty dictionary, The Canterbury Tales ( a collection of stories told by pilgrims on their way to Anglo-Saxon Canterbury Cathedral) is the main reason that Chaucer is known as the daddy of English literature. He was, at various points, a soldier, diplomat, custom’s official, judge, courtier and astronomer, so moves fluidly from grand chivalry to gross-out: from the courtly Knight to the plastered Miller with his Carry On account of a man tricked into kissing a woman’s “naked ers”. In creating a 360-degree portrait of medieval society, though, Chaucer’s default position is one of sly satire (the religious figures of the Summoner and the Pardoner are exposed as horribly corrupt) and it’s the comic creations who are the most memorable. There’s also, despite the rhyming couplets and Middle English’s habit of sticking an “e” on the end of every other word, a surprisingly modern sensibility at work: the next time someone refers to a depressingly sexist situation as “medieval”, point them to the Wife of Bath: a five-times-married cougar with a strident manifesto based on female sexual satisfaction.
What to say: The blueprint for English humour
5. King James Version
1611
Translating the Bible is hard. Not just because there is a lot of it (the Good “Book” is, for Protestants, actually 66 books) but because translation is such thorny religious territory. In 1054 the Western Christian Church split from the Eastern one in part because of a (mis)translation of a single word in a creed. In more recent centuries, punishments for translation had included being burnt at the stake. Off-putting. Because these aren’t just any words — change them, and you change God. However, the temptation to tweak was great because, despite the author, the raw material was not always top-notch. St Jerome, who produced the Bible’s first coherent Latin translation, called its prose “rude and repellent”. If this was the word of God then God, it seemed, had very poor grammar. King James evidently decided not to replicate this and the 47 scholars he chose to create his translation produced some of the most resonant phrases English had or has ever seen: a time to kill; by the sweat of your brow; eat, drink and be merry; how are the mighty fallen . . . all are from that one book.
What to say: English would never be the same again
6. Paradise Lost
John Milton, 1667
As a literary challenge, “justifying the ways of God to men” ranks even higher than writing a 50,000-word novel without using the letter “e” (yes, it’s possible: Ernest Vincent Wright did it in 1939). However, John Milton, a hard-up, blind, former civil servant who had just seen his beloved republic collapse, attempted just that. The resulting blank-verse epic describes the angel Lucifer/Satan’s failed rebellion, and Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall in the Garden of Eden. It is astonishing for several reasons: the “musical delight” of the verse, which makes fluid rhythms from Milton’s thorny-seeming word inversions; the strange, overpowering imagery (Hell’s flames give off “no light, but rather darkness visible”) and the moral complexity. Traditionally the verse epic was for nationalistic hero-worship: Milton turns the form into a nuanced meditation on divinity, humanity, liberty and reason. For many readers the poet, despite his personal faith, does not “justify” the ways of God. He does the opposite: the charismatic rebel Satan becomes the real hero, making Milton, in William Blake’s words, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” — an idea that has been picked up by authors from Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) to Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials).
What to say: Sympathy for the Devil? It started with Paradise Lost
7. Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen 1813
It is a truth universally acknowledged that “It is a truth universally acknowledged” is one of the most recognisable, not to mention over-quoted, first lines of any classic. Austen’s book is also one of the most loved, adapted and rewritten – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone? It is easy to see why directors love it: £10,000 a year in 1813 (Darcy’s famous income) results in some very telegenic sets in 2013. And according to Austen adaptor Andrew Davies, “Jane Austen’s plotting . . . suits a TV serial perfectly”. Austen’s novel was popular from the moment it was published. Byron’s future wife called it “the fashionable novel”. However, Austen herself profited little from it in fame or fortune. It was published anonymously and any money from its sales went to the publisher, to whom Austen had sold the rights for £110. Still, she later gained great credit with critics: one compared her to Homer while F. R. Leavis called her one of the four great English novelists. And how did one of England’s four greatest novelists view her writing? We only have one phrase, and it is ineffably Austenian. In a letter, she simply stated that she produced “little effect after much labour”.
What to say: A woman in possession of a good plotline must be in want of a TV adaptation
8. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë, 1847
You might think that Mr Darcy would provide enough passionate smouldering for any woman. Not for Charlotte Brontë, who called Austen’s writing a “carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden” — which, in the Victorian era, was stern criticism indeed. She instead invented a hero who was not carefully fenced (he admits to having had three mistresses) and who smouldered even more than Darcy: the Gothically brooding Mr Rochester. Equally passionate was Jane Eyre, the heroine with whom he eventually falls in love. Brontë chose to tell her life of “plain” Jane Eyre in the first person; a device associated from Roman elegy onwards with heightened emotion. She has been called “first historian of the private consciousness” and so the literary progenitor of Proust and Woolf. There was a little too much emotion for contemporary critics who accused it of being “coarse” — particularly when they learnt that its “male” author, Currer Bell, was one Charlotte Brontë. Brontë was ready for them:Jane Eyre, often described as a feminist novel, contains lines that could have been pre-drafted for such carping. As Jane says, “it is narrow-minded . . . to say [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings . . . It is thoughtless to condemn them . . . if they seek to do more.”
What to say: Reader, I married him. But not before I taught him a thing or two about the evils of the patriarchy and of androcentric hegemony
9. Moby-Dick
Herman Melville, 1851
Herman Melville probably wanted to write a conventional travel adventure along the lines of his early successes such as Typee and Redburn, but somehow unreality kept intruding. Instead we have the prototype of the Great American Novel as the insane Captain Ahab pursues his quest to revenge himself on the great white whale that cost him his leg. Melville went to sea when he was 20 and later served aboard a whaling ship. Moby-Dick (first published as The Whale in 1851) was not a success in his lifetime, he died almost forgotten until his literary reputation was revived by, among others, D.H. Lawrence.Moby-Dick is sometimes mistaken for a children’s adventure story, but this is no Treasure Island sea dog’s yarn; rather it is a complex and sometimes difficult work. Its origins as a factual description of the whaling life give rise to a mass of information that can slow the narrative; but its descriptions of life on ship frequently flip over into complex philosophical rumination. There is a cast of unforgettable characters (the narrator Ishmael, his shipmate Queequeg and the first mate Starbuck) and by the stormy conclusion you are in no doubt that this is a novel about good and evil and the battle for a man’s soul.
What to say: Even the most ardent Greenpeacer will be captivated by this whalehunt
10. Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
The master of the English novel — equally revered by literary critics and “ordinary” readers – produced many stories that have woven their way into the fabric of our culture, but if all others faded it isGreat Expectations, his penultimate completed work, that would remain. It was originally planned as a monthly serial but, to save his flagging magazine All the Year Round, Dickens switched to weekly instalments. The result was an extraordinary sense of compression and power: it is the opposite of the “large loose baggy monster” (as Henry James characterised the 19th-century novel). The story of Pip’s journey from humble blacksmith’s apprentice to gentleman corrals a brilliant cast of characters – kindly Joe Gargery (“What larks, Pip!”), the obsessive spinster Miss Havisham, the eccentric clerk Wemmick – in an elegantly mysterious plot. This is not a neat, jollyBildungsroman, though: it is shot through with guilt (“It is a miserable thing to be ashamed of home,” Pip says), greed, debt, violence and the melancholy of its middle-aged narrator, whose ending was even more shadowy and unresolved in Dickens’ original version.
What to say: Desert-island Dickens
11. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, 1865
Middle-aged clergymen with an interest in photographing little girls in undress, would probably be looked at somewhat askance nowadays. A Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pen-name “Lewis Carroll”) de nos jours might well find himself answering some pointed questions in the local police station. One is grateful that Victorian Oxford was more relaxed about such things. Dodgson (a maths don) loved the company of little girls and he wrote Alice in Wonderland specifically for Alice Liddell and her sisters — a colleague’s little girls. Alice, in the first chapter, is discovered reading under a tree in high summer. A white rabbit rushes by, feverishly consulting a watch. She rashly follows him down a hole in the ground, encounters various locked doors, eats and drinks substances which enlarge and shrink her, encounters mythical creatures such as the Gryphon, extinct creatures such as the Dodo, toothy, but smiling, creatures such as the Cheshire Cat, breaks in on the Mad Hatter’s tea party and is finally sentenced to be beheaded by the irascible Queen of Hearts. As the playing card entourage falls on her, decapitation in mind, Alice wakes with dead leaves brushing her face. It was summer, and now is autumn: the little girl is growing up. Why has the book, designed for a warm afternoon’s entertainment, lasted beyond its day and its era? Because it pulls off that most difficult of tricks —it’s a children’s book for children of all ages.
What to say: The Frenchman said it: little girls get bigger every day
12. Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1877
Frankly, even before the Keira Knightley film version, many readers were drawn to Tolstoy’s realist classic by the promise of historical totty. There’s Vronsky, with his skinny white trews and military bling; Levin the sensitive country aristo; and of course Anna Arkadyevna Karenina herself, the beautiful married woman whose wild heart St Petersburg society cannot contain. The great, fatal passion between Anna and Vronsky is conjured in the rich emotional language of an intellectual Mills & Boon yet is underpinned by a keen analysis of a moral climate that makes society a dangerous place for freedom-loving women. As the old mores of 19th-century Russia give way to a more liberal culture, the social fabric ruptures with painful and confusing consequences for everyone from princesses in palaces to peasants on the field. Country ways are pitted against urban sophistication, adulterous thrills against family stability. If that sounds like The Archers, well there is something soapy about Tolstoy’s irresistible love story (and the readers of The Russian Messenger, in which Tolstoy’s work, like Dostoevsky’s, was first serialised, surely deserved a bit of romance after Crime and Punishment). That makes it no less revealing about the lengths we will go to to fill our hearts with the right stuff.
What to say: The only love story you ever need to read
13. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1884
Mark Twain gave American authors their “voice”. Unlike its predecessor, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is narrated autobiographically in what Twain calls “the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect”. Huck is semi-“sivilized” (much against his will) thanks to the iron discipline of the widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, who have adopted him. Huck’s obnoxious father returns, liquor-thirsty for his son’s $6,000 (the fortune that came the kid’s way at the end ofTom Sawyer). Huck escapes by faking his death and as a runaway lives an idyllic life on the deserted Jackson’s Island. His Man Friday duly appears in the form of Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave. The new comrades drift down the Mississippi experiencing a series of adventures. Most importantly, Huck (himself a lower-caste Irish kid) learns to respect a man who is called, 219 times in the narrative, the N-word. As D. H. Lawrence noted, great 19th-century American novels have tended, in the 20th century, to be relegated to the status of children’s books. Perversely, however, the greatest of them all,Huckleberry Finn, is now on banned book lists in schools across the land.
What to say: Ernest Hemingway said it: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”
14. A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
It would be unlikely to happen to a GP today. When Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical practice in Southsea, patients were scarce. To fill time he started writing short stories. One of these, A Study in Scarlet, featured a man whose “thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness”: Sherlock Holmes owed his creation to medical science in other ways. While studying medicine at Edinburgh, Conan Doyle was taught by Dr Joseph Bell, a founding father of forensic science, who emphasised the importance of acute observation of everything from accents to tattoos in the diagnosis of an illness. Holmes soon became hugely popular – too popular for Conan Doyle who started to resent how Holmes “takes my mind from better things”. Just seven years after creating him, he duly despatched him to his death over the Reichenbach Falls — though so distraught were the fans that he soon was forced to reluctantly resuscitate him. Interestingly, the creator of the world’s most perceptive detective sometimes missed elementary clues himself. Conan Doyle always credited Dr Bell with being his inspiration but, as Dr Bell later wrote to him, “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.”
What to say: From Poirot to Marlowe, they owe it all to Holmes
15. Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad 1899
Just four words secure Heart of Darkness’s place in posterity: “The horror. The horror.” The dying words of the anti-hero Kurtz were chosen by T.S. Eliot as the original epigraph for The Waste Land and have served to sum up all the atrocities of the century at whose very beginning (in 1899) they were written. Francis Ford Coppola’sApocalypse Now is pretty much a direct transposition of the story from Africa to Vietnam. Conrad was one of English’s more remarkable authors: born in Poland, he did not speak the language in which he wrote so affectingly until he was in his twenties. Like most of his work Heart of Darkness draws on his own experience as a seaman. It is very short (110 pages) and Kurtz does not appear in person until the 80th page, but the ivory trader sunk into depravity in the depths of the jungle in the far reaches of the Congo is an unforgettable creation. Modern critics have levelled charges of racism at the book, but while the language is of its time (the nameless African characters are “savages” and worse) its true subject is the greed of colonialism and how easily the fragile veneer of Western culture is ripped aside.
What to say: Civilisation goes up the creek, without a paddle
16. Ulysses
James Joyce, 1922
This is the novel which rewrote the rules of fiction as drastically as, in the same year, T. S. Eliot rewrote the rules of poetry. Modernism had arrived. Joyce wrote Ulysses after leaving Dublin, never to live there again. However, Dublin never left him. Homer has to be looked for rather hard. The 20 years of the Trojan hero’s journey home is shrunk into one day — June 16, 1904. It’s the story of a 38-year-old office worker, Leopold Bloom. A lapsed Jew, who converted to Catholicism to marry his wife, Molly, Leopold knows she is being unfaithful to him. They had a son who died. During the course of the day, Bloom forges a paternal relationship with Stephen Dedalus — the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses shakes old narrative techniques and conventions to pieces then re-assembles them in new and challenging forms. He also challenged conventional literary respectabilities with lavatory scenes and four-letter words. Not everyone at the time was won over. Alfred Noyes, author of the perennially popular poem The Highwayman(it’s still on the National Curriculum), fulminated. “There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages . . . Ulysses would make a Hottentot sick.”
What to say: One small day for Bloom, one giant leap for literature
17. Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, 1925
Tradition has it that when describing a book you briefly summarise what happens in it. With Mrs Dalloway, that would be to miss the point. Mrs Dalloway is not about events. Which is not to say that nothing happens: Clarissa Dalloway hosts a party and meets an old lover; Septimus Smith, a soldier, commits suicide by jumping from a window. But it is the characters’ reactions, narrated in the “stream-of-consciousness” style, that is the book’s main interest. No character is too marginal for Woolf, who believed that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”. She denied the influence of Joyce, adding for good measure that Ulysses was an “illiterate, underbred book”. Like Septimus, Woolf heard birds sing in Greek and tried to commit suicide by jumping from a window. Like Clarissa, she led a well-connected glamorous life and was attracted to women, famously having an affair with Vita Sackville-West. However, that also misses the point. Which is that Mrs Dalloway is, quite simply, a brilliant book.
What to say: Character is everything. The rest is noise
18. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Ignore, if you can, Baz Luhrmann’s recent film version, which took this slim and elegant modern myth and hammered it into a spectacular, misshapen, overwrought mess. What Hollywood tends to forget is that Gatsby is not a snap-to-fit love story: it’s an intricate tale of money, class and the green-lit American dream of an “orgiastic future”. Fitzgerald was an instant Jazz Age celebrity with his cool, precocious debut This Side of Paradise (1920) and his high-profile marriage to Zelda Sayre, but by 1924 he had become disillusioned with the “trashy imaginings” of his magazine stories and set out to write a “consciously artistic” masterpiece. He succeeded. In the seductive figure of Gatsby (a millionaire with a shady past, a consuming obsession with a married woman and a blind faith in his ability to rewrite his own history) he captured something essential about the illusory nature of a society in thrall to advertising, consumerism, celebrity and the financial marketplace. And he did it in a prose that somehow provides both dry, realist clarity and fantastic visions. In 1925, it was ahead of its time. In 2013, it’s no wonder we still return to The Great Gatsby.
What to say: A book to give bankers
19. The Trial
Franz Kafka, 1925
It’s the ultimate nightmare: being arrested by an all-powerful regime for an unnamed crime and having no recourse to appeal. Of course it’s happening somewhere in the world now just as it was in 1914 when Kafka wrote his ground-breaking slice of German-language noir, The Trial. When Josef K, an innocent bank worker, is arrested one morning, he is sucked into a machine of the State that is all the more creepy for the fact that actual imprisonment is replaced by quietly sinister forces of control, threat and paranoia. Set in an unnamed European city reminiscent of Kafka’s native Prague, it is both very much of its time (the book was banned by both Nazi and Soviet regimes, doing the rounds as the hottest piece of anti-totalitarian diatribe on the underground scene) and a universal vision of what we all fear most: being robbed of our agency and so made, in a way, less human. Whether you read it as a sociopolitical allegory of bureaucracy gone bad or a Sophoclean drama about the irresistible pull of fate, this fraught, dark little book is nonetheless shot through with a mordant black humour that gives it a unique, unforgettable charm.
What to say: Whether it’s bureaucracy or brutality, we’re still living in a Kafka-esque world
20. Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust, 1922
Everybody knows how Marcel, the narrator of Proust’s great rich novel, tastes a cake — a madeleine — that has been dipped in tea, and finds that it triggers off memories that go back to his childhood. This has often suggested to would-be readers that it will be a long, introspective work. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is what Marcel remembers that matters — and that is a superb story of Paris life, packed with insight that rivals Balzac and comic scenes that rival Dickens. Many of the characters in it, from the pig-headed servant Francoise to the witty and arrogant Duchesse de Guermantes and the vain but emotionally enslaved homosexual Baron de Charlus, are absolutely unforgettable. Marcel’s odyssey takes him first into the disintegrating world of aristocratic French society, intriguing him but then disillusioning him, next into obsessive love for the perplexing “bicycling girl” Albertine, which proves equally unsatisfying, and lastly into art, which he finds will save everything and make it all worthwhile for him. The novel we have, written by Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, is — we realise — the novel that Marcel writes, after the First World War, as the climax of his life.
What to say: One man’s experience encompasses practically all human experience.
21. All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque, 1929
Germany’s famous chronicler of the Western Front in fact spent only 49 days on it. Erich Maria Remarque arrived on the June 12, 1917; was wounded by shrapnel on July 31 and spent the rest of the war in a hospital. It had been long enough. When he returned he wrote a fictionalised account of the experiences of young men like him who were, because of their experiences, “not youth any longer”. All Quiet on the Western Front was published in January 1929 and sold 1.2 million copies in Germany alone within 12 months. It made Remarque a rich man and a famous one: it was later made into a film and he had an affair with Marlene Dietrich. Pacifists praised the book as antiwar. Remarque said it was “neither an accusation nor a confession”. The Nazis disagreed, saying it showed “treachery towards the German soldiers of the World War”. It was one of the first books to be publicly burnt in 1933 and Remarque was stripped of his German citizenship. He emigrated to America. His sister Elfriede, who stayed behind, was less fortunate. In 1943, she was accused of undermining morale and beheaded “to atone for his guilt”.
What to say: One of the greatest works of pacifist literature is born . . . in time for another world war
22. Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell, 1949
In a 1946 essay George Orwell said one of the main reasons writers write was: “Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever [and] be remembered after death.” It’s an aim that his novel 1984 amply achieved. Completed in 1948 (it has been said the book’s title came from reversing this date) and published the following year, it describes a dystopian totalitarian Britain in the near future, ruled over by “Big Brother” who keeps control with propaganda and the Thought Police. As that sentence shows, 1984 not only gave us an impressively prescient prism through which to view the 20th century, it also created numerous neologisms. It was not an easy book to write. In that same 1946 essay, Orwell described writing a book as “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness”. In the case of 1984 that was also literally true. Orwell wrote it on the Scottish island of Jura while suffering from the TB that would kill him. When he finally finished it, he said he was “not pleased with the book but . . . not absolutely dissatisfied”. History has judged it rather more kindly.
What to say: Big Brother is still watching us
23. Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Vladimir Nabokov tried to destroy the manuscript of Lolita several times, and had it not been for his wife’s intervention an incinerator would have been the sole recipient of some of the most heady prose ever written. Hopeless infatuation, illegal desires and utter desperation have rarely been more vividly realised than here, as they inflame Humbert Humbert, the 37-year-old aesthete who falls in love/lust with his 12-year-old stepdaughter Dolores Haze, whose nickname Lolita has since become the label for pubescent sexpots the world over. Nabokov insisted there was no moral to the novel, leaving Humbert — such an unreliable narrator he even gets his own pseudonym wrong — to condemn or vindicate his misappropriation of a young girl’s body and life. Thwarted from consummating a childhood summer romance, he has been chasing its conclusion ever since. Though Humbert grows older, the girl always remains the same . . . except, of course, she can’t. “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita,” he remarks, and doom pervades the novel as Lolita teeters on the cusp of adolescence, and the increasingly paranoid and diabolical Humbert on the precipice of insanity.
What to say: A peerless perv with peerless prose
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez 1967
A mythic reinterpretation of the history of Colombia rendered via the story of seven generations of the same family (many of whom confusingly have the same names) doesn’t sound the easiest sell for a novel. However, just read the opening sentence of Márquez’s masterpiece — “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” — and you’ll know you are in the hands of a master. One Hundred Years of Solitude kickstarted, with Mario Vargos Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, the boom in Latin American literature, helped to open insular British readers to works in translation and all but invented a whole genre — magical realism. No wonder Márquez won a Nobel prize. It is a novel of glass cities, ghosts and bizarre events that appear mundane, and mundane things, such as ice, that appear magical. The trick is to lie back and let the richly symbolic prose flow over you. There are so many books, not least Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , that would not exist without this one.
What to say: Latin American writing enters the world stage
25. The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood 1985
Sci-fi meets feminism in Atwood’s revolutionary, genre-busting 1985 novel. The result is the kind of book that simply refuses to go away, lingering spookily at the back of the mind even decades after reading. It’s quite the most beautifully written piece of patriarchy-blaming ever published and the deserving winner of many prizes. Set in Gilead, a futuristic dictatorship where America has been taken over by a misogynistic cult based on the total subjugation of women through financial, social and reproductive control, this terrifying parable is told by Offred, one of the “handmaids” used only for reproduction by the military elite. Offred’s world is replete with queasy details of the way women’s bodies (not to mention babies) are co-opted by the regime, and the underlying Christian schema of the oppressors makes it all the more hideous. Not to mention controversial: the American Christian Right have been up in arms about this bombshell of a book for years, and it’s easy to see why. With the current debate over women’s right not to give Jesus-loving legislators control over their reproductive systems, Atwood’s mesmerising parable seems more vital than ever.
What to say: What do women want? Not rapey enslavement, mostly
Shaun Finnie
Shaun
Jules
Shaun Finnie
Stephanie Fairbrother
Sent from my iPad
Claire Hawes
Yes Steph I've read "Harold Fry". I wuld rate it no higher than "OK" - I think I said at the time that I felt as if it had been written specifically for book groups to discuss. I didn't quite like Harold enough to care about him. I know it's been a best seller this summer though, so I would seem to be in the minority, I'll be interested to hear your opinion.
CarolB was MNKB
glenc
Lesley Martin
Sent from my iPad
CarolB was MNKB
Think I might again soon now thinking about it.