There’ve been way more than ten, of course. But these things are always hard to figure. When you’re young it is too easy to be blown away. One lacks all those bitter years, the accretion of protective layers – the scar tissue of life. Tougher and tougher to break through emotionally, philosophically; harder to inspire that sense of wonder; to read something that hasn’t been written before.
Which is to say, it’s hard to move the heart of a cynical old cunt.
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I have many fond memories of the first books that swallowed me whole. Took me deep down into their worlds. The Belgariad, by David Eddings; The Many Coloured Land, by Julian May; The Amtrak Wars, by Patrick Tilley, The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer, these come to mind. No idea if they were any good, but at the time I couldn’t get enough. The vivid imaginings: the post-apocalyptic, the psychic powers, the world-shaking adventures. All the good stuff.
Though none of these endure as influences.
Neither does Ender’s Game. Now controversial because of the political views of its author, but I can’t deny it grabbed hold of me when I was twelve or thirteen. Enthralled.
There’
s a Wocket in my Pocket by Dr. Seuss must have blown my mind, because it’s the first book I can remember reading. To this day I retain a primal fear of the Zelf up on that Shelf. I know this because my son (5) was reading it to me a few weeks back and I felt the echo of chills more than thirty years old. In my 20s I read a lot of Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment very nearly made this list, for example. But it hasn’t quite had the endurance in my intellectual or emotional life as the others listed below. One that has retained resonance over time is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but this can’t be included because OH MY GOD HE INCLUDED SHAKESPEARE WHAT A TWAT.
Getting one’s mind blown is often a function of youth, as I say, but also of timing. The right book at the right time. A need met, an insight given, a secret yearning articulated on a page.
These ten hit the spot, hard.
- The Days of Perky Pat
Twelve or thirteen years old and I wanted something different to read. I said this to the shop assistant at the local book store, and boy, did he know his stuff. This collection of short stories, from an author I’d never heard of, blew the top right off my head.
I’d never read anything like it. The paranoid, surreal-within-the-quotidian, the drug-fuelled, the brain twisting – poor old David Eddings and co. couldn’t touch the mad genius of Philip K Dick. After The Days of Perky Pat (which includes the classic novella The Minority Report) I couldn’t go back. I continued to seek out the experience of that first encounter with PKD.
No more, for me, the warm firesides where legends were told. No more chosen one narratives, no more grand tales where good vanquished evil. No, the dark and the twisted and the tragic and the plain old fucking weird, became my jam.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
I was sixteen and this was one of those prescribed texts in high school. I’m not sure if I got it the first time around. Probably not, given I failed most classes. But at some point, Nineteen Eighty-Four became embedded in my subconscious. In the way I understood control, and oppression, and memory, and language. The novel has become embedded in the western conscious (and beyond) in much the same way – in particular around the use and misuse of language.
The concept of the Orwellian state persists, as well. Today, the surveillance and control exerted by the Chinese regime goes beyond Orwell’s darkest fevre dreams. Social and political credit schemes to grade each citizen, facial recognition software, the great internet firewall, the regime’s online army of censors and trolls (2 million and growing). Sure, like the West, China adds a dash of Brave New World to the mix – the mindlessness of consumerism to distract the masses. The soma of our day-to-day. The US has not been particularly imaginative on this score: with the current epidemic of prescriptions opioids over there, opiates are now the opiate of the masses.
His impact endures, East and West. The Burmese like to say George Orwell wrote three books about their country: Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood were all sought out and read in my longing for the dystopian insights I’d received via Nineteen Eighty-Four. Brilliant books, all, but the most influential was the first. Oh and I shouldn’t forget Heart of Darkness, which tells the dystopia of colonialism.
- The Outsider
The Outsider by Albert Camus, in my view, is one of the classic noir novels (the US version of the novel is called The Stranger). Camus, Sartre, and many of the other existential philosophers drew inspiration from the hardboiled fiction of the late 20s and 30s – that is, the literature that formed the basis for many of the classic films noir of the 40s. Albert Camus was reportedly a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Horace McCoy.
The Outsider was my first encounter with existentialist literature, and being in my early 20s, it was the kind of novel that was going to stick. The story of a man at odds with the world. The absurdity of a culture who condemns – not for murder, but for failing to weep at his mother’s funeral. Feeling a stranger in one’s own society, alienated from the day-to-day, a refusal to play the games. You can see how that might make an imprint.
- Slaughterhouse-Five
Towards the end of Slaughterhouse Five, a friend (Edgar Derby) of the protagonist (Billy Pilgrim) is summarily executed by German troops for stealing a teapot. This is in the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden, an attack that killed tens of thousands of civilians in a firestorm. Prisoners of war, Billy and Edgar had survived the attack from their own side by hiding – with their German guards – in an empty slaughterhouse.
Vonnegut de-romanticises war, even a just war, by shining a light on the dark absurdities of conflict. A trivial theft punished with death: a landscape of monstrous violence a just act.
Slaughterhouse Five influenced the way I thought about war, and Vonnegut’s work as a whole – his loose, jazzy style; his use of black humour to convey the bleakest of ideas or events; the inventiveness and ease of his storytelling – showed me a pathway to writing about the darkest subjects.
- The Remains of the Day
As a lover of science fiction and the hardboiled, my admiration for Kazuo Ishiguro is not entirely explicable. But I do and he is my favourite living author. I could put pretty much any of his novels here (or better still, all of them). His reflections of memory, regret, misguided loyalty, and his elucidation of the tragic art of self-delusion, effected me deeply.
Ishiguro is known for his exquisitely spare, subtle, yet heart-breaking novels. He has the remarkable gift of crafting simple sentences that are yet laden with emotion and hidden meaning.
More than anything it is his unreliable narrators, who have denied themselves love or happiness in the service of the grotesque (the protagonists of Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, and Never Let Me Go), or who have lived lives of self-delusion (When We Were Orphans), endure in my mind.
Ishiguro explores the idea of complicity. His protagonists never take a stand against a corrupt ideology or rule, but rather look back decades later (if at all) with the distant realisation of their part in a greater evil. His most recent work, the Buried Giant (criminally misunderstood by just about everyone), tackles the vexing question of collective memory – whether it is right that a society forgets aspects of its history, and the terrible consequences of remembering.
- The Dispossessed
It’s rare to find a novel that imagines a radically different political system so thoroughly and so honestly.
When I went to protest marches back in the day, anarchists were always, always the douchebags in the mix. They were the children of the movement, adept at fucking things up, ruining the collective message, breaking some windows, and running away.
Le Guin was an anarchist, which for me went some way to absolving the juvenile bullshit I witnessed way back then. Better still, she imagined what an anarchist society would look like. It’s not perfect, she’s under no illusions: the subtitle of the novel is, an ambiguous utopia.
Le Guin had the intellectual courage in The Dispossessed to explore the failings of her ideals, as well as the triumphs. Anarres represents an anarcho-syndicalism society, its twin planet Urras has a capitalist system. She reflects on the corruptions of each, the failings of revolution, and the freedom in losing everything.
The Lathe of Heaven deserves a special mention here. It’s the best Philip K Dick book he never wrote.
- Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon,
The Glass Key
I read these in quick succession and can’t remember which was first. Whichever it was, from the first sentence on, I was blown away by Hammett’s use of the English language. 1929 was the year his first novel, Red Harvest was released, and one can see why was credited with creating the ‘hardboiled’ genre. Each sentence is stripped down, efficient, and yet – like Ishiguro – always conveys so much more about character and milieu.
Beyond his remarkable prose, Hammett wrote directly about the economic and social conditions of the day, including those he witnessed firsthand as a private detective for the Pinkerton Agency during the 1920s. The Agency was, for the most part, used as a union-busting private police force by a corrupt elite. This made an indelible impact on Hammett, who later joined the communist party.
Hammett in his personal and professional life stood at the juncture of capital and labour, a dispossessed underclass and a corrupt elite, and poured this knowledge into his work.
James Ellroy argued Hammett wrote about: “How crime seamlessly pervades the body politic and defines a whole culture”, and that Hammett: “Wrote the man he feared he might be – tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue.”
I try to re-read at least one of these three novels every year. Hoping, absorbed through my fingertips, his virtuosity with sentence and structure will transfer to my own writing.
- The Sorrow of War
The Sorrow of War opened my eyes to the nature of Vietnamese suffering during and after the war with America.
The author, Bao Ninh, served during the American War. Of the 500-strong brigade he set out with in 1967, he was one of only ten survivors. Many believe the novel is a thinly-veiled autobiographical account of his experiences. The Sorrow of War was initially banned by the Vietnamese government, though is widely available there now. Structurally and thematically it has parallels to Slaughterhouse Five. Though unlike Vonnegut’s novel, The Sorrow of War is a harrowing read.
Nearly every depiction of PTSD I’ve seen in film and literature has been of US soldiers, and none explored the non-western experience. This novel does, and in so doing, destroys the stereotype put forward Vietnamese government and the US entertainment industry: the Vietnamese as a stoic, self-sacrificing, resolute foe; automatons fighting various Imperialist invaders.
The experience of PTSD for the story’s protagonist (Kien) is in some ways recognisable to the Western reader: the insomnia, the anxiety, the nightmares, reacting violently to stress, and so on. The other part – through the influence of Vietnamese cosmology and culture – will be deeply unfamiliar. The protagonist of The Sorrow of War is haunted, literally, by the spirits of the land and by the ghosts of dead comrades.
The Sorrow of War gave me a new understanding of war and suffering.
There. Done. Missed some, without doubt. As I write this line two more have popped into my head. But fuck it. These ten are damn fine.
