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OLD FAVOURITES
George Orwell - "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
Though the future depicted for England thankfully did not come to pass, Orwell's major work is a warning against the perils of totalitarianism. It depicts a nightmarish world where the only place for privacy and freedom of expression is within the mind; but even there the all-pervasive State seeks to control thought by eradicating vocabulary that could be seditious with the rationale that, if there is no word for a crime, it cannot be committed. Against a background of general deprivation and automaton-like uniformity, our hero Winston drifts into an underground resistance movement that may just be another arm of the State...
Boccaccio - "The Decameron"
Before I read this I had imagined it to be some dry old classical work of limited appeal. How wrong I was! The book is in fact a collection of one hundred tales supposedly recounted by a group of travellers on pilgrimage, and they are a delight to dip into. Funny, bawdy or just plain silly, it shows us that the middle ages obviously weren't all misery and pestilence.
Luke Rheinhart - "The Dice Man"
A book with a unique and mind-expanding idea. A man decides one day that his successful but mundane existence can be revolutionised by letting a pair of dice make his decisions for him. At each juncture, be it trivial or serious, a list of options is drawn up (including both pleasant and unpleasant ones) and a number allocated each. The dice determines the course of action to be taken, and must be adhered to no matter what. The result is a thought-provoking and entertaining journey of self-realisation.
Guy Sajer - "The Forgotten Soldier"
Many soldiers' memoirs are either detached and clinical, or read like comic book stories full of war propaganda. Not so with Sajer, a half French half German who served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front from 1942 until the end of the war. Full of bitterness, his uncompromising narrative records the chaos, carnage and sheer horror of modern warfare like no other book on World War II. What is more important is that the perspective is that of the losing side in the most significant, but largely ignored, theatre in that conflict. Some have cast into doubt (unconvincingly, in my opinion) the authenticity of this work since it reads like a novel, however this is precisely its strength - the author's feelings and impressions are immediate, raw and undiluted.
Umberto Eco - "Foucault's Pendulum"
People who love conspiracy theories, complex plots and esoteric historical references are in for a treat with this one, for Eco has created a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. And being Eco, it has enormous depth and learning underpinning it. You have to admire a man who begins a chapter with a Hebrew quote which he doesn't bother translating for you. Yes, you will need to do some work while reading this, but it is a first rate tale full of suspence, intrigue and humour too.
Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh - "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail"
This book is actually quoted in the one above. It is the first great conspiracy theory book that has spawned a whole host of pale immitations since the 70s. The authors begin a historical investigation which begins with a simple story of lost treasure in the south of France but soon mushrooms into disturbing and far-reaching findings on Christianity and its origins. When I first read this book I was truly shocked. Well written and highly entertaining, even if the final conclusions are unproved supposition, the authors have shed new light on many puzzling aspects of the murkier corners of European history.
Ivor Cutler - "Gruts"
Ivor Cutler is a cult Scottish personality who has been peddling his accordian-backed vignettes of a bizzarre Glasgow childhood since the 60s. This particular book of short stories is long out of print, but it is a gem. The tales are macabre and off-beat to say the least, and each one contains a deliberate grammatical error. Rather than attempt to explain the nature of these stories, I'll just give you a few of the titles - 'The Human Awl", "Old Cups of Tea", 'The Ouch-Stopit-Merriman String Quartet", "Spoon Control", "The Beserk Leg" and "The Man with the Trembly Nose." This is without a doubt my favourite book, and really fired up my imagination as a child.
John Lennon - "In His Own Write"
More tales of the absurd, again from the 60s. John Lennon was persuaded by a friend to put some of his weird stories and pictures in print as a kind of counterbalance to the vacuous fluff of the early Beatles records. These oddities (and those from the subsequent volume 'A Spaniard in the Works') capture the real essence of Lennon's wicked sense of humour which did not often come through in his music.
John Fowles - "The Magus"
A strange and mystical journey into other-worldliness that defies logic and eschews a conventional plot or ending. It tells the tale of an Englishman working as a teacher on a Greek island who gets caught up in the machinations of a local rich man who enginneers bizarre incidents and encounters that leave the protagonist uncertain as to what is real and what is not.
Anthony Beevor - "Stalingrad"
Traditional military history can often boil down to dry sequences describing what unit moved where at what time. Anony Beevor, however, has crafted a book that not only gives us the bigger strategic picture, but also fills us in on what was happening to the individuals who actually took part in the battle. What this gives us is a human face to the events which tranforms specialist literature into a bestseller. A powerful portrayal of the full horrors of Total War, the book is also important in that it reminds the general public that World War II was decided not on D-Day in Normandy, but in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union.
Jaroslav Hasek - "The Good Soldier Svejk"
This work is the perfect counterbalance to Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" in that it is a comedy whose hero, a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army of World War I, is a bumbling idiot. This unfinished novel with its delightful cartoon illustrations follows the exploits of Svejk, a kind of metaphor for Czech resistance to the crumblng Empire, through a long series of adventures that parallel the life of the author who was once fired from the editorship of a nature magazine for making up stories about non-existant animals. Anyone who's been to Prague will enjoy this book, and you can still visit some of the pubs mentioned.
Franz Kafka - "The Trial"
Kafka's brooding and prophetic tales written feverishly in the Prague night capture perectly both the atmosphere of that city and the wider philosophical dilemnas facing modern man. In this work a man is inexplicably arrested and begins a frustrating journey through labyrinthine bureaucracy in order to find redress. By the end of this nightmare he has submitted to the faceless law and goes like a lamb to the slaughter without ever finding out what his crime was.
Haruki Murakami - "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Perhaps the most popular Japanese writer of today, much of his work has been somewhat pretentious and insubstantial. This novel, however, is a sublime and mysterious tale of an unemployed man whose wife disappears. His subsequent search for her leads him to encounter an array of strange characters through whom he experiences dark tales of wartime Japan and ends up sitting at the bottom of an old well.
D. T. Suzuki - "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism"
D. T. Suzuki spoke fluent English and was one of the first to attempt to explain the unexplainable - Zen - to the Western mind. Such was his stature that the forward of this slim volume is written by none other than C. G. Jung. Highly recommended for anyone interested in gaining an understanding of the purest form of Buddhism, this book strips away the nonsense and the mystique, revealing above all Zen's down to earth nature.
Thomas Pynchon - "Gravity's Rainbow"
There is no doubt that this is a tough book to get through, and as such it is often likened to Joyce's 'Ulysses'. However, it has much to offer in that Pynchon, America's great reclusive author, writes in many voices so that you may go from rocket science (yes, real German rocket manuals) to custard pie slapstick in the course of a couple of pages. And his characters frequently burst into song, too. This particular tale is set in the last days of World War II and concern the shadowy world of espionage and counter-intelligence and the search for the Nazi's secret weopons. Some say it has no plot, too many characters and no ending. Well, there is some justification in this, but the journey through the book itself I have found both highly rewarding and entertaining, since above all Pynchon has a great sense of humour.
J. R. R. Tolkien - "The Lord of the Rings"
Yes, yes, this trilogy has been hyped to death by the recent films (great though they are), but still these books are classics. Originally published in the 1950's, Tolkien founded a genre but also ensured that nobody would ever equal him. Why? Because he chose to invent an entire history together with mythologies and languages before he ever began the book, thus creating a backdrop of enormous depth and authenticity. Couple that with a tale of great emotional resonance featuring purity of love, courage, duty and evil, and you have a universal theme. One of the few books I've read more than once.