These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Part Three – Books

After much internal debate, I managed to come up with a list of eight albums that I would take on Desert Island Discs, and a handful of films that I would consider to be my favourites. They were easier lists to compile than the books that I would regard as my top five, ten, or even fifty.

These days I don’t seem to be able to read books at the rate I used to. There was a time when I would get through one or even more a week – on one holiday in the Maldives, I managed six in just under a fortnight – these days I’m down to about one a month, although there are exceptions.

One reason may be that novels seem to be getting longer. Where once 250 pages might have been considered a decent length, it now appears that most have barely blown the dust off the story at that stage, with 500 pages seeming to be the norm. I find this somewhat challenging at times; all too often I’ll race through the first 200 pages of a novel and then stall for a further couple of hundred that seem no more than padding before reaching the denouement, which itself gets dragged out for a further 100 pages or so.

I’m looking forward to Robert Galbraith’s new novel in the Cormoran Strike series, Troubled Blood, which is to be published in September 2020, but the hardback is slated to come in at over 900 pages; the story is going to have to be pretty damn good if I’m going to wade through a book that long.

Like most people, my taste in books has changed over the years. From The Famous Five, and Jennings as a child, though Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Alistair McLean, and Frederick Forsyth as staples; through science-fiction, courtroom dramas, murder mysteries, thrillers, and steampunk, I’ve gone through many phases and authors, but there are a few books that I cherish, and some that I have read and re-read with never diminishing pleasure. At present I’m steering clear of the more dystopian type of books – I have a couple lined up that at present I’m saving for happier days – in favour of more escapist stories.

The War of The Worlds by HG Wells is by any definition, a classic. It has been the inspiration for TV and movie adaptations (although I’m still waiting for a faithful, Victorian-set version, the BBC’s offering last year was a grave disappointment). It’s a relatively short book and the plot is everything – the characters are fairly non-descript (we learn little of them other than their professions) – but it’s a more subtle book than it appears at first glance, with its commentary on evolution, British colonialism, and potential invasion of Britain.

Around the time I first read The War of The Worlds, I dipped my toe into more modern science-fiction with Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Niven’s Known Space universe comprises a consistent environment for his stories in which man co-exists with other, alien species, of which two travel to the artificial megastructure, the Ringworld, along with the human, Louis Wu. This spawned a series of sequels and prequels, but this is the original and best. A number of Niven’s later novels featured too much science and too little fiction; this gets the balance right.

Philip K Dick is one of science fiction’s most filmed authors. Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and The Adjustment Bureau are among the films that have been inspired by Dick’s writings, Electric Dreams was a highly successful TV series based on some of his stories and most recently there was Amazon’s brilliant series, The Man In The High Castle. Having recently watched that series, I reread the book, which despite the alternative history theme, is one of the most mainstream novels that Dick wrote. Of all his novels, my favourite is Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, the story of TV chat-show host Jason Taverner, who wakes up one morning to find himself in a world where no one knows him and his TV show does not exist. As with many of Dick’s works, Flow My Tears, which is set in a USA that has become a totalitarian, police state, following a civil war, deals with identity, what being human means, and the possibility of alternative realities. 

Few books warrant repeated rereading as much as The Diary of A Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith. The book describes the largely mundane daily events in the lives of a London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son Lupin, and their friends. Pooter is a literary forebear of Victor Meldrew or Captain Mainwaring; he’s a bit pompous, being over imbued with a sense of his own importance, he’s a bit of a social climber, but things often go wrong for him. 

In a similar vein, Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, depicts someone lacking any sort of self-awareness; pompous, practically useless but endowed with a belief that he is brilliant in all his endeavours. Originally published anonymously, Augustus Carp was written by Harley Street doctor Henry Howarth Bashford, I would recommend it to anyone who has read and enjoyed Charles Pooter’s adventures.

It is always rewarding to read a book, recommend it to someone, and then see them share the enthusiasm that one has for it. Two such books that I have suggested to my wife are The Crimson Petal and The White, and The Magpie Murders. Michel Faber’s Crimson Petal revolves around William Rackham and two very dissimilar women, his wife Agnes and the prostitute, Sugar. It’s a wonderfully written, thoroughly absorbing story that is rarely a comfortable read but is very rewarding.

he Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz features a novel within a novel, as a book editor reads one of her author’s latest manuscripts, about a very Agatha Christie-like detective, and finds a real murder mystery entwined within its pages. It’s really very clever and enormous fun.

I am often drawn to so-called weird fiction; Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and China Mieville’s The City and The City for instance. Iain Banks’ Walking On Glass is in part, weird, but Banks is (or sadly, was, as he died in 2013) otherwise a writer I have struggled with. His mainstream novels, written as Iain Banks are eminently readable, however of his science-fiction stories (written as Iain M Banks), I lapped up The Player of Games, but the struggled miserably with his subsequent sci-fi tomes and had to give up on the last one I attempted (and I cannot even recall which one it was), so impenetrable (and boring) was it.

These days I like to read solely for pleasure; I've given up any pretence of reading much that is literary or high-brow except occasionally. Frankly, life’s too short to read dull books, so in addition to the above, my reading centres on what I enjoy, such as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, the Shardlake novels of CJ Sansom, and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels.