Books pile up by the desk as you work on a project. They’re research or inspiration, or talismanic, or just fortuitous. You look for what connects them. Their separate outlines begin to merge and soon they form a single imaginary map. This map has a small empty space at the centre. Somewhere in that space is the book you’re trying to write.
Louis MacNeice writes:
What is it we want really?
For what end and how?
If it is something feasible, obtainable,
Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land
Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both heart and brain can understand
The movements of our fellows;
Where life is a choice of instruments and none
Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
And thought is free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheer power and mere profit
Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
Where the people are more than a crowd.
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, xxiv (1939)
Last month the BBC produced a list of ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’, and in response Nina Allan challenged writers and readers to make their own lists of 100 novels that have shaped them personally. Here’s mine. A list like this is an exercise in painful exposure, showing up all kinds of prejudices and limitations. Looking at the authors of the books on my list, I’m keenly aware of the gender imbalance and the cultural and ethnic narrowness. Whereas a ‘public’ list like the BBC’s needs to be representative and inclusive, for the private list-making citizen the imperative is to be honest — and in doing so you discover a lot about where you’ve come from. It’s also an exercise in recognition.
I like this game because it feels truthful to the way a reading life works: you assemble a private canon that is deeply shaped by coincidence and caprice, by encountering a certain book at the point in your life when you’re ready for it to make its impression. Your private canon is a tradition visible only to yourself, and it may or may not have anything in common with the traditions of others. It’s a coded autobiography of childhood and adolescence, and of the way adolescence continues in secret down the decades.
My list is in rough chronological order of reading; I’ve kept to the rule of one book per author, but I’ve stretched and broken the definition of ‘novel’ to include novel-ish experiences that come in the form of story collections, poetry collections, plays, comics, memoirs, whatever.
Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski
Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Saga of Erik the Viking by Terry Jones
Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All by Tony Robinson
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
Legend of the Shadow Warriors by Stephen Hand
Mort by Terry Pratchett
The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
Red Shift by Alan Garner
Earthsea sequence by Ursula Le Guin
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Young Men in Spats by P. G. Wodehouse
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
Tales of the Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov
Dune by Frank Herbert
Ghost Stories by M. R. James
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Company by Samuel Beckett
Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Maus by Art Spiegelman
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Stories by Franz Kafka
In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks
Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Books of Blood by Clive Barker
The Dark Half by Stephen King
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Stories by Anton Chekhov
Emma by Jane Austen
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
Faust by Robert Nye
The Magus by John Fowles
The Immoralist by André Gide
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The Mysterious Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Blood by Michael Moorcock
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman by Angela Carter
Mefisto by John Banville
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Fludd by Hilary Mantel
Continent by Jim Crace
Little, Big by John Crowley
I am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse
I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Myles by Flann O’Brien
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
In Viriconium by M. John Harrison
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
Iron Council by China Mieville
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Crow by Ted Hughes
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Conundrum by Jan Morris
The Strings Are False by Louis MacNeice
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Another Country by James Baldwin
How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
Murmur by Will Eaves
The Unseen Hour by James Carney *
If All The World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
* Disclosure: The Unseen Hour is not a book but a serial horror-comedy podcast in the style of The Goon Show, and its creator is my brother. But I include it here because it has been one of my most joyful readerly experiences of the last couple of years — listening to its fifty-odd episodes has often felt like reading a peculiar, anarchic serialised novel.
Issue Nine of the excellent Belfast literary magazine The Tangerine is out — a really strong selection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews, reviews and artwork. A story I wrote, ‘Eurydice Box’, is in there.
Nicholas Royle’s Best British Short Stories 2019 is out today from Salt Publishing.
Including my story ‘The Heights of Sleep’!
I’ve done a short interview with the novelist Ruadh Butler. Instead of questions, Ruadh uses quotations from well-known writers — in my case leading to ramblings about David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, among others…
