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| Allison & Busby, 1984 |
Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984) by ANTHONY BURGESS
The author of A Clockwork Orange (1962) and the underrated masterpieces Nothing Like The Sun (1964) and Earthly Powers (1980) offers his selection of the best novels published in the English language between the outbreak of World War Two and 1983. Each book is discussed in a pithy one page essay which explains the key points of its plot (without giving it away) and why, in Burgess's view, it deserves to be included on his list. While the majority of his choices –– Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948) –– are works which now form the cornerstones of modern Western literature, at least half the book is devoted to books –– Saul Bellow's little read 1947 second novel The Victim, Erica Jong's 1977 bestseller How To Save Your Own Life –– which might best be described as 'Literary Oddities' or what is often dismissed these days as 'Middlebrow Fiction' (ie. not literary enough to win the Booker Prize and not sadomasochistic enough to become a record shattering bestseller). Burgess's style is erudite but entertaining, while his own tremendous skill as a novelist ensures that his insights are never anything less than incisive, intelligent and consistently thought-provoking.
Ninety-Nine Novels is currently out of print.
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| Carcanet/Millennium Ford edition, 1997 |
The English Novel (1930) by FORD MADOX FORD
This brief guide to the development of the English novel was written by one of its finest practitioners, the author of The Good Soldier (1915) and the World War One tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928, recently adapted for television by playwright Tom Stoppard). Ford was at the forefront of literary Modernism –– he collaborated with Conrad, knew Stephen Crane and Henry James, advised Joyce and Ezra Pound and 'discovered' DH Lawrence, Hemingway and Jean Rhys via his editorship of The English Review and its Paris-based successor the transatlantic review (its title was deliberately printed in lower case to emphasize its role as the unofficial journal of Modernism). Ford's book is a delightfully biased explanation of the development of the English novel as he saw it, beginning with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and ending with Henry James and Conrad and covering most things in between, all packed into just 142 easy to read, generously spaced pages. It's an eccentric, idiosyncratic book and, at times, a very illuminating one as Ford flits from one author to another and back again, not forgetting to include a few of his own literary (and not-so-literary) reminiscences along the way –– something he was to do at greater length in his equally fascinating memoirs Return to Yesterday (1932) and It Was the Nightingale (1933).
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| Dalkey Archive Press, 1998 |
Nine years after The English Novel Ford published an infinitely more ambitious work titled The March of Literature (1939) –– his attempt to trace the development not only of the novel, and not just of the English novel, but of the entire course of world literature from Ancient Egypt up till what was then the present day. It was a mammoth undertaking and it's a mammoth book although not, by any means, a portentous or dauntingly academic one. Ford's aim in writing it –– it was his last published work and his eightieth book since publishing his first in 1891 –– was to identify and celebrate the literature of every continent and culture, written, as he put it, by 'an old man mad about writing.' Its composition also represented an astonishing feat of memory on the part of its sixty-five year old author. It had been years, in some cases decades, since Ford had last read many of the books he discusses and he supposedly wrote The March of Literature entirely from memory without once referring to notes, making his achievement (if the story is true, something which can never be automatically assumed in Ford's case) that much more remarkable.
The March of Literature may still be available from the Dalkey Archive Press, as may The English Novel from its UK publisher Carcanet.
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| Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 1999 |
Collected Essays (1969) by GRAHAM GREENE
This book is worth seeking out if only to read The Lost Childhood, its brilliantly incisive introductory essay written in 1947. Few writers have written so eloquently about the role that reading and the discovery of books play on the emotional development of an impressionable child. But that is far from being the only reason to seek out this collection. Greene writes just as eloquently about the authors –– Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, W Somerset Maugham, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac and RK Narayan, among others –– who influenced his own work as a novelist and, in the cases of Mauriac and Narayan, were also his literary contemporaries. Nor is he ashamed to cast a critical eye on the work of so-called 'minor' writers –– Frederick Rolfe, George Darley and Simone Weil to name just three –– whose books, in his opinion, deserve to be more widely known than they are. Collected Essays also includes his famous 1933 essay about the work of Beatrix Potter, in which he analyses the literary techniques she used to create classic children's tales such as The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908). Potter hated the essay and promptly sent him a letter saying so, explaining that the 'emotional disturbance' he claimed she had been enduring while writing The Tale of Mr Tod (1912) was nothing more than a severe headcold.
Collected Essays is currently out of print.
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| Penguin Books UK, 2006 |
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006) by NICK HORNBY
The author of Fever Pitch (1992), High Fidelity (1995) and About A Boy (1998) writes about the books he buys (too many), the books he reads (not enough) and why both activities are so important to him and ought to be to you and I as well. These pieces, which originally appeared as a regular column titled 'Stuff I've Been Reading' in the North American magazine The Believer, cover everything from Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates to books about Issac Newton and how to stop smoking to the (then) latest novels of Jonathon Lethem and Lionel Shriver. They are not so much reviews as attempts to prove, in an amusing and honest way, his theory that what we read plays a formative role in making us who and what we are. Hornby never shies away from controversy either, happily debunking modern literature's 'obsession with austerity' and the commonly-held belief that it's an intellectual sin to read things like graphic novels and sports biographies because they're not serious enough to merit the attention of a literate, intelligent adult. But his best advice is that life is too short to waste even a tiny part of it slogging your way through a book you're not enjoying, whether it be a universally acknowledged classic or a pop star's trashy warts-’n-all autobiography. Hornby is obviously saying what a lot of people want to hear because his new book, published in August 2012, is another collection of his latest 'Stuff I've Been Reading' pieces titled More Baths, Less Talking.
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is still available from Penguin Books, as are the individual volumes it collects from North American publisher McSweeney Publishing.
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| Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 2001 |
Ten Novels and their Authors (1954) by W SOMERSET MAUGHAM
This book came into being because the editor of Redbook magazine asked Maugham to name what, in his opinion, ranked as the ten best novels ever written. The subsequent article –– in which Maugham suggested that it was perfectly acceptable, even advisable, to skip the boring parts of allegedly 'great' novels if doing so made them more enjoyable to read –– resulted in him being approached by a publisher who wanted to reissue the ten books he had selected in new editions personally abridged by him.
Thankfully, Maugham declined this offer to re-invent the classics but, intrigued by the idea of what makes a great novel truly great, decided to expand his original comments into ten separate essays in which he discusses, in his usual clear-sighted way, Tom Jones (1749, Henry Fielding), Pride and Prejudice (1813, Jane Austen), Le Rouge et le Noir (1830, Stendhal), Le Père Goriot (1835, Honoré de Balzac), David Copperfield (1850, Charles Dickens), Madame Bovary (1857, Gustave Flaubert), Moby Dick (1851, Herman Melville), Wuthering Heights (1847, Emily Brontë), The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Fyodor Dostoyevsky) and War and Peace (1869, Leo Tolstoy) –– all, with the exception of Tom Jones, classic nineteenth century novels which can still be read today by anyone willing to visit a library, a bookstore or their preferred digital download site. What makes Ten Novels and their Authors unusual is Maugham's insistence that the circumstances of an author's life directly influence their style and his fearlessness in citing what he sees as being the major defects of the works he places under the microscope. He never allows his obvious admiration for the ten novels in question or the novelists who wrote them to blind him (or the potential reader) to the fact that the aim of fiction should be 'not to instruct, but to please.'
Ten Novels and their Authors may still be available as a Vintage Classics paperback.
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| Simon & Schuster first US edition, 2008 |
Books (2008) by LARRY McMURTRY
Books is Larry McMurtry's reflection on his lifelong love of reading and virtually every type of book (not just fiction), beginning with the 'bookless' childhood he spent on his father's ranch in Texas and continuing into his student years at Rice University and eventual emergence as a popular novelist and screenwriter who, in later life, successfully combined these seemingly incompatible professions with a new career as a secondhand bookseller. He shares many fascinating anecdotes about his book loving habit along the way –– how not owning or having access to many books as a child fuelled his need to buy so many (and even steal a few) as an adult, his then unfashionable interest in collecting erotic comics and other examples of frowned upon mass market non-literature, the many buying trips, successful and unsuccessful, he undertook over the years to find stock for his stores. Written in an easygoing confessional style, without a trace of apology or self-consciousness, McMurtry makes you feel like you're listening to an old trusted friend tell you why books still matter and why finding the time to sit down and read one is an activity we should all be making a lot more time to engage in.
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| Simon & Schuster first US edition, 2009 |
In his second volume of memoirs Literary Life (2009) McMurtry relates his love of books and reading to his development as a writer, explaining how certain books and authors influenced his desire to become 'a man of letters' and informed the choices he made about his work and even in his daily life. Like its predecessor, Literary Life is a must read for anyone concerned about the imminent demise of the traditionally printed book and everything –– the publishing industry, the bookselling trade, the world's literary heritage and perhaps the very idea of authorship itself –– that we as a society are so blithely discarding in our relentless pursuit of ever newer, ever shinier technology. Books and Literary Life are both available in paperback, but if you want to buy them –– in fact, any new traditionally published book –– my advice is not to dawdle. The literary memoir is an endangered species and certainly won't be able to compete for shelf space with the likes of EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey (now the bestselling paperback of all time, outselling even the ubiquitous Harry Potter series) and what will no doubt be Ms James's inevitable avalanche of imitators for too much longer.
The third volume of LARRY McMURTRY's memoirs, titled Hollywood and dealing primarily with his time as a screenwriter, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2010.
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| Book Club Associates, 1972 |
Literature and Western Man (1960) by JB PRIESTLEY
What can the author of the 1929 bestseller The Good Companions and the 1945 humanist play An Inspector Calls possibly tell us –– the ultra-hip users of Twitter and Instagram –– about the history of Western literature that we don't already know? And why should we care that he went to the trouble of writing such a book on such a dull and irrelevant subject anyway? The answer to these questions is, respectively, 'A lot' and 'Because the past never stops being part of or influencing what happens in the present and the future.'
For decades JB Priestley was one of the English-speaking world's most popular authors, a novelist, playwright and essayist who unashamedly wrote for ordinary people rather than highbrows and intellectual snobs. His exhaustive survey of the development of Western literature (not unlike Ford Madox Ford's in The March of Literature), beginning with the invention of the printing press and ending with a sympathetic analysis of the work of Thomas Wolfe, is written with the same mixture of intelligence and unpretentious, plain-spoken common sense that characterized every word he published for close to sixty years.
Priestley's aim, it seems, was to demystify literature and eliminate the fear that names like Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Zola, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf provoked (and still do) in the minds of people who feel –– wrongly, in his view (and mine) –– they lack the brainpower required to investigate and appreciate their work. Priestley was a lifelong believer in the ennobling power of literature (in a time when people still believed that books and the people who wrote them were of vital cultural importance) and felt it had a crucial role to play in restoring the hope and dignity crushed by the invention of the atomic bomb and the post-war world's ongoing obsessions with greed, self-interest and mindless consumerism. While he's not always fair or accurate in his assessments –– he claims, for instance, that Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and John Osborne's groundbreaking 1956 play Look Back In Anger are about nothing but sex –– even his presumptions are interesting for the light they shed on his belief that literature was one way 'to challenge the whole de-humanizing, de-personalizing process, under whatever name it may operate, that is taking the symbolic richness, the dimension in depth, out of men's lives, gradually inducing the anaesthesia that demands violence, crudely horrible effects, to feel anything at all.' Encouraging the reader to feel something, Priestley wants to remind us, is every bit as important as finding new ways to keep them engaged and entertained.
Literature and Western Man is currently out of print.
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Last updated 19 May 2023
