My Best and Worst Books Ever

I was starting to think about a weighty post on the Javier Marías novel I finished last week, and then I thought, for heaven’s sake, it’s Saturday! So today has officially been given over to a little fun and frippery, and I will write something with more intellectual content tomorrow. Marías we’ll get to next week. For now, just because it entertains me to do so, I’m listing my five best and five worst books ever. By ‘best’ I mean the ones that made the most powerful impact on me and have stayed with me over the years as extraordinary works of literature. I could have mentioned far more than 5, but it was also an interesting challenge to limit myself. By ‘worst’ I mean the ones I gave up reading and was most disappointed in, or most repelled by. Naturally many people will disagree and I do apologise to anyone whose favourite novel ends up in this category; reading is a wholly subjective process that is profoundly affected by the age and the stage at which we read things. I would have struggled to find more than five books to list here, so you have some idea how rare it is for me not to get on with a novel.

Best Books

1. Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

This was one of the great books of my university career for me, and I think it would be very interesting to do a reread one of these days to see whether it still speaks to me the same way. I love everything I’ve ever read by Hesse, who is deeply influenced by Buddhism and writes frequently about questions of individual identity and the path of life. The main protagonist of Steppenwolf must learn to integrate a neglected part of his identity and does so with the aid of mysterious friends and the strange Magic Theatre. Hesse is brilliant at portraying an ambiguous state in which the reader is unsure whether what is happening is real or fantastic and he explores it to the full in this novel.

2. Colette, Chéri

What have I not said about this book already? Colette’s sumptuous prose is married in this novel with a powerful story about the unacceptability of women’s ageing. The opening scene in which Chéri is playing on Léa’s bed, trying on her pearl necklace is one that will stay with me forever more, and Léa is one of Colette’s great female characters. A survivor, a chameleon, a bountiful, generous lover and an Epicurean, she embodies feminine good sense and sensuality. May her example rise before me as I grow old.

3. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

One of my great books because it is so very clever in such a fun and playful way. It’s not enough that Barnes is one of the best producers of the brilliant sentence, nor that he should be so erudite and learned, it’s the combination of the two in a wittily experimental form that makes this such a stellar novel. Whenever I have to teach Flaubert’s works, I seriously consider handing out Barnes’s spoof examination paper instead.

4. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Talking of experimental modern fiction…. But this is a very different kind of novel to the Barnes. Like everything Rilke wrote, it is powerful and painful and intense, demanding and perplexing and excessively, wonderfully lyrical. Whenever I read it, it takes me to the heart of wondering what literature is about, what stories we can tell and what we need them to do for us. I have a vague, unformulated theory that the most brilliant writers tap into times of cultural and historical transition and write the unease and the incoherence that characterizes them with elegance and insight. That’s what this novel does.

5. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

This is a relatively recent addition to my personal canon, having read it only last year for the first time. There’s a certain literary atmosphere that I think of as ‘elegant doom’ and some novelists create it with spectacular results. It’s hard to put my finger on what was so magical for me about this novel, but the quality of the imagery was amazing, and the way those images were stitched onto a background of sparkling, fervent despair. It’s the novel of what it looks like beyond the end of desire, when everything is shot to pieces and ruined and bilious and exasperated and yet it is all still so very beautiful. It’s the ruination of dreams, the terminal stage of hope, but oh so gorgeously done.

 

Worst Books

1. The Sea, John Banville

Few books have left me feeling so cheated as this one did. It ought to have been wonderful – childhood loves and losses recalled, the present negotiated, glorious prose, evocative Irish atmosphere, and for me it was just empty. It’s the only book I’ve ever read three-quarters of before feeling that I really couldn’t be bothered to finish it. I didn’t understand why I was being told the story.

2. The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch

I think this was one of the first books I ever gave up on. When I was younger I had a pact never to abandon a novel unfinished, but I read about 50 pages of this before life began to feel terribly short and precious. There have been other Murdoch books I’ve read that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed (The Unicorn, for instance). I can’t recall now, this long ago, why I disliked it so much; I can only recall the surprise I felt that I was actually putting it down for good without a sense of guilt. If anyone ever writes and publishes a novel called The Sea, The Sea, The Sea, I think I should avoid it, don’t you?

3. Lettres Persanes, Montesquieu

This eighteenth century tale is written as a series of letters between two French travelers in Persia and their companions back on the mainland. It’s a classic of its time, one of those, ‘my goodness me, you’ll never believe how the natives organize their society and doesn’t it reflect in ironic and pertinent ways on the situation back at home’ kind of books. People love it; academics have written many fine critical appreciations on it. Me, I just couldn’t get through it despite multiple attempts. It always sounded interesting when lecturers spoke about it, and then a couple of chapters into the reality and I was losing the will to live. What’s truly ironic is that it now features on the introduction to literature course we set for the first years, so I’ll have to teach it when I go back next autumn. Oh helpington! as my son is fond of saying.

4. The works of Boris Vian

Vian is an important cult figure in France for his manically absurd novels. They maintain a frantic pace, use a great deal of wordplay and are relentlessly surreal. I want to like them, really I do, but they just set my teeth on edge. It’s a nuisance because I ought to include his work in the academic book I’m writing, but I dislike it so much I can’t get through a whole novel. I am forced to the conclusion that I don’t care for what’s shallow and parodic. I don’t like Voltaire’s Candide much, either, and Vian is kind of a modern day version on recreational drugs.

5. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Blame school for this. I was obliged to read Dickens aged 15 and I’ve never quite recovered from the experience. Dickens was a bit too much of everything for me, too much sentiment, too much plot, too much character, rather like pantomime without the laughs. It never felt real or like I could really care of my own free will, without being manipulated into it. I often think I ought to give Dickens another go, and then I look at my teetering TBR piles, full of tempting books I’m longing to read and I think, another time, maybe…