My Personal Literary Canon

My personal literary canon is the collection of great books I adore which blow me away, that I return to often.

Utopia for Realists - Rutger Bregman

Less utopian, more evidence-based-and-undeniable, the world outlined by Bregman has a change in political mindset as much as a change in policy.

It feels both within grasp and, in light of the political realities, highly unlikely.

What’s a “Realist”?

As well as the policy changes for which Bregman advocates, the meta-argument he makes throughout the book is that policy decisions today are made on the basis of assumption (or prejudice) and ideology.

Politics on the Edge

Rory Stewart, today of podcasting pseudo-fame, was previously best known for walking across Afghanistan & pretending to take selfies in a London park.

An MP from 2010 to 2019, on the surface he sounds like the kind of Tory destined for power: Eton & Oxford educated, officer in the armed forces, well read. Yet this book highlights exactly why Stewart did not find the heights of success in conventional British politics, and perhaps why we wish he had.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Richard Feynman

Feynman takes one of the most complicated theories and makes it make sense, right in front of you. His genius of simplicity is why he’s so well known, amazing.

The Big Sleep is about as dark and gritty as crime fiction gets. Chandler has a gift for painting rain-drenched, gloomy pictures of LA, and a knack for leaving the reader floating in uncertainty.

I first read The Big Sleep when I was at school, after a teacher compared a short story I had written to the style of this book. She was being rather generous, but I did enjoy the no-frills way that Chandler delivers the plot, in Marlowe’s dry witty voice. A glad re-read.

The Spy & The Traitor - Ben Macintyre

👏 Could not put this down. A stronger story & sense of character than most fiction. Best non-fiction of 2021. DO NOT read this if you have plans. You’ll cancel them, and keep reading. Bravo.

Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

This was my first Murakami, so I don’t know whether this is typical of hist style, but Norwegian Wood strikes the perfect balance of understated “Hemingway”-ness and meaningful character connection, where most books lean heavily and detrimentally in one direction. A fascinating study of mental health, suicide, and survival & loneliness that warrants a second read.

The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles

At a recent talk at the London Literary Festival, Towles suggested that he has no defining, transcendent style or voice. His pride is in bringing the voices of his characters to life. He did this so brilliantly and vividly in the Gentleman of Moscow. It’s scary how different the two books felt, coming from the same author.

The Lincoln Highway is told from multiple perspectives, both third and first person, centred around the activities of several young men that have left a juvenile work camp, and wish to make new starts. The twisting of fait and fortune stunt the start of their trip, which never gets going. The book had a similar feel. As we switch quickly between the characters, it feels as if we aren’t given quite the time we need for the story to get much traction. Although plenty happens, pages are filled with verbose stories that then serve as contrived metaphors, and we never feel the characters are spreading their legs.

Circe - Madeline Miller

The Song of Achilles was a brilliant, marching story with a main character that we really got to know.

In contrast Circe’s plot fumbled, and the main character is one dimensional – the rejected child turns powerful witch and courageous goddess. She is developed no more than that.

What makes this book worth reading is the fascinating breadth of mythological characters we meet. Where Song of Achilles retells Homer’s Illiad, this retells the Odyssey and many more tails. It’s a comprehensive introduction to Greek mythology told in Miller’s voice, ironically bringing even the God’s to mortal life.

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep is about as dark and gritty as crime fiction gets. Chandler has a gift for painting rain-drenched, gloomy pictures of LA, and a knack for leaving the reader floating in uncertainty.

I first read The Big Sleep when I was at school, after a teacher compared a short story I had written to the style of this book. She was being rather generous, but I did enjoy the no-frills way that Chandler delivers the plot, in Marlowe’s dry witty voice. A glad re-read.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini made his name in his depiction of the moral struggles of a young boy, growing up in Kabul with the backdrop of Afghanistan’s wars and strife, with The Kite Runner. In A Thousand Splendid Suns Hosseini’s protagonists this time face struggles inextricable from the agony of Afghanistan, and in particular the struggles of women, from before the Soviet invasion, through civil war, Taliban rule, and US invasion.

Greater freedoms for women is not a new topic to the country. Women enjoyed significant relative freedoms through large periods of 20th Century Afghanistan, including the banning of the burka and the stark rise in female education. Yet they have still too frequently been treated as cattle for trading, for wedding and birthing sons. As Hosseini notes in his epilogue, and as Ansary says in the Game Without Rules, much of rural Afghanistan, the places where revolt after revolt stirred, and the humble origins of the Taliban leadership, never modernised through those periods. For women in those areas, the Taliban regime was just another name for their husband’s authority.

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

Christie opens with an author’s note:

It was well received and reviewed, but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.

The concise note explains the amount of planning that went into this book, with a plot deceptively simple and masterfully woven.

clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation

I need not try to put it any differently, except to add that this book pulled me in with a firm grip. I am a slow reader, but I finished this in one dark, mysterious evening. I sat in my living room, searching for the murderer as if among the plain faces of these acquaintances Christie had conjured in front of me. The book disappeared from between my hands. I was there, on the island, wretched with nerves as I waited eagerly for what was to come next.

The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

The Girl with the Louding Voice is a gripping, sad but hopeful account of a young girl growing up in Nigeria, who has to face an appauling chain of circumstances as a result of the accepted treatment of women, and of the poor. Some of the circumstances are specific to Nigeria, but the ideas, injustices and themes of the book transcend that context.

We explore female oppression, vulnerability and exploitation, and particularly how each feeds the next. Adunni herself comments that although slavery is banned, without more help and less judgment of vulnerable people, especially towards women, exploitation will always be possible. While oppressive, unequal and unreasonable expectations and demands are placed on women, they will continue to be put in vulnerable positions. Adunni’s story shows us that justice can only be achieved with preventions and protections, and equal expectations & treatment of all people.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

This 1984-esque novella has an intriguing sub-absurdist linguistic style that pulls you in from the early pages. Its active mode of description is especially captivating — rather than trying to paint a picture it brings this unusual world to life. The kind of book, at least at its outset, that makes you dive for pen and ink to take up your own writing.

The book raises an important set of questions: to what extent should we pursue and prioritise happiness, joy? At the expense of knowledge, learning and curiosity? Beatty represents the view that learning is opposed to happiness, that intellect is elitist snobbery. Therefore burn the books. The counter point as brought by Faber and eventually others, is that the world and those in it benefit from this learning. There is meaning beyond happiness, to discover, and explore ambiguities.

Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

With one short drag I inhaled this book and held my breath. In the course of a day’s reading I was moved to laughter and despair with such intensity as I cannot remember from any previous book.

Easily the book of 2021 so far for me.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the very best kind of triple threat. It has character, plot and plenty of style.

The development of our main character is heartwarming. Through difficult circumstances we are constantly struck by her courage and intellect. Her story rouses a pride and affection that few other literary characters could claim.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a phenomenal, wide ranging story that draws you into a rollercoaster of pain and fortune. It offers a superb depiction of Afghanistan in the late 20th Century, and how it changes. You will come to love the characters, who the author does not fain to pretend are heroes, and you’ll find yourself yearning their memories with them, in latter chapters, with plenty of tears.

The book offers a fantastic representation of power, positions of privilege, and the pride & guilt that come with them.

Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

A brilliant, entertaining dive into the history of Afghanistan, its characters, occupants, political, cultural and religious forces. Modern Afghanistan is a tale of cities, and their “modern”, West-sympathising elite, and the rural more conservative masses, whose lives of religious faith have been continuously disrupted by invaders promising “democracy” and “a better life”.

If you want to understand what shapes the Afghanistan we see today, and why the West has continually tried and failed to control it, this is the book. More than anything, the book vibrantly presents the cultural clashes and misunderstandings which have befuddled invaders time and again, proving that only Afghans can determine the future of their country.

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

This was a regrettable re-read. In my memory Tender is the Night was a pleasant, clever novel. My opinion of it this time is quite different.

Clearly the light, airy, bright prose that make Gatsby a masterpiece did not come to Fitzgerald this time. In its place is a contrived wax-work that is hard to behold. Where Gatsby’s description is etherial and dazzling, here it is heavy, cumbersome, trying hard to sound witty. Its verbosity, and repetitive nature, re-combing trodden ground, reads like an early draft.

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

A fascinating, lyrical account of the life of the Caribbean immigrants in London in the 1950s. It captured the daily essence of what it was to come to this lonely, impersonal city, where they often feel and are made to feel like unwelcome outsiders.

The book is funny and honest. It does a great job of depicting the inane conversations that occur among men, and how concerns of work and avoiding starvation mix in with considerations of meeting girls and having a good time. The landscape of London is timelessly recognisable, through the eyes of the immigrant group getting to know the city. It is made impossibly familiar by the ‘head down, fight to survive’ mentality that grips it.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

I put off reading The Bell Jar because I had the received notion that it was melancholic. That is to misunderstand the book the same way that mental illness is often misunderstood. It is not sadness, it is pain and struggle.

The Bell Jar presents one of the most captivating struggles with mental health issues that I have ever come across, and represents Esther not just as a realistic survivor, but one of the most recognisably human characters in literature. More than for any book to memory, I read the tale of Esther’s life with knowing empathy, that this was a person I recognised and knew.

Dr. Johnson's London - Liza Picard

A fascinating insight into the life & times in London during the period where so much of what stands today was established.

Ashenden - W. Somerset Maugham

A mildly entertaining set of stories. The main character is quite flat, and a little more clever than the plots themselves, so that it becomes mostly a set of his witty but convoluted observations of the world and general life, in abstract. Other characters do little to distinguish themselves from one another, and are often inconsistent. Mr Harrington, in the final story, is a fantastic and hilarious character with so much more to recommend him than any other in terms of his development. He is starkly entertaining, and his interpretation of the Russian Revolution is comic to a fault. Yet even he turns from a rabid chatterbox to an unwary charmer from beginning to end.

Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney

The book divides itself into two concurrent forms, the interleaved details of the two central characters’ daily lives, and emails sent between them. The general order of the chapters is: chapter on character A, email from A to B, then vice versa and repeat. The emails are so distinct from the “action” chapters that it is worth discussing them independently. This distinction is in style, purpose, and as I will argue, even personality, considerations and concerns of the characters involved.

My Personal Non-Fiction Canon

My personal literary canon is the collection of great books I adore which blow me away, that I return to often.

Wait and Hope - The Count's Parting Message