littlesmackerel

I’ve noticed that my science fiction friends are keen on making lists: the twenty best films of the year, or my ten favourite operas. I don’t see much point in a list unless you discuss why you’ve selected particular items. English author Chris Priest was inspired by a BBC program, ‘100 novels that shaped our world’:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/100-novels

and, on his blog, compiled a list of 100 books that have shaped his life: https://christopher-priest.co.uk/a-hundred-books Of these he says, ‘The uniqueness lies only in the totality, the existence of one title thought of as special in the context of all the others of similar specialness, memorable in a life full of fairly disorganized and impulsive reading… I do not claim world-shaping impact on me from these titles, nor are all of them novels, but they form part of the silent context from which one views the world and reacts to it.’

I decided to have a go. What are the books that have shaped my life? I was daunted by the thought of 100 books and in the end I came up with only 75 titles. Past 75, I was starting to list books I’d enjoyed, whereas for each of the 75 books I’ve listed I believe I can describe some way I was affected or changed. Not surprisingly, a lot of books from childhood fall into this category — some are very simple, opening up an awareness, eg of history.

Chris and I had eleven books in common. Listed in alphabetical order by author, they are:

1	The Dam Busters Paul Brickhill
2	The Outsider Albert Camus
3	Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
4	Dubliners James Joyce
5	Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
6	The Tale of Samuel Whiskers Beatrix Potter [all of Beatrix Potter for me]
7	The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
8	Collected Sonnets William Shakespeare [particular sonnets in my case]
9	Hamlet William Shakespeare
10	On the Beach Nevil Shute
11	The Time Machine H G Wells

I was intriuged that Chris chose The Tale of Samuel Whiskers as his special Beatrix Potter book. It’s the story where, up above the ceiling, rats make a kitten into a roly-poly pudding. I loved all of the Beatrix Potter books and especially remember that the Flopsy Bunnies became ‘soporific’ when they nestled amongst the cabbages — it became a word in my three-year-old vocabulary.

Here are my books, in alphabetical order by author:

12	A God in Ruins Kate Atkinson
13	Emma Jane Austen
14	Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
15	The Noise of Time Julian Barnes
16	The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes
17	No Friend but the Mountains Behrouz Boochani
18	Testament of Youth [of Friendship and of Experience] Vera Brittain
19	Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
20	Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
21	Peter and Co [and all of the Billabong books] Mary Grant Bruce

22	The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
23	In Cold Blood Truman Capote
24	Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll
25	The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir
26	Descartes’ Error Antonio Damasio
27	Great Expectations Charles Dickens
28	The Wasteland T.S. Eliot
29	The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
30	The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan
31	The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan

The Secret Garden was first book I read completely by myself: I can still hear the wind ‘wuthering’ on the moors.

32	All That I Am Anna Funder
33	My Experiments with Truth M Gandhi
34	Frames of Mind Howard Gardner
35	Monkey Grip Helen Garner
36	The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
37	The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer
38	Daddy We Hardly Knew You Germaine Greer
39	Grimm’s Fairy Tales The Brothers Grimm
40	The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway
41	Brave New World Aldous Huxley

42	The Princess Casamassima Henry James
43	The Golden Bowl Henry James
44	The Turn of the Screw Henry James
45	The Wings of the Dove Henry James
46	My Brother Jack George Johnston
47	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
48	The Good People Hannah Kent
49	The Rainbow D.H. Lawrence
50	Women in Love D.H. Lawrence
51	The Road Cormac McCarthy

52	Saturday Ian McEwan
53	Nutshell Ian McEwan
54	Collected Stories Katherine Mansfield
55	The Complete Short Stories Somerset Maugham
56	The House at Pooh Corner and Winnie the Pooh A.A.Milne
57	Stravinsky’s Lunch Drusilla Modjeska
58	Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
59	Animal Farm George Orwell
60	A Valley Grows Up Edward Osmond
61	Old Peter’s Russian Tales Arthur Ransome

I expect that many readers won’t have come across A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond. It was given to me when I was about eight years old. It describes the changes in a fictitious valley, both geological and social, from ancient times to the 20th century. Beautifully illustrated, this book made me think about what particular places were like, say, 100 years ago and how they had changed over time.

Pooh, Piglet and Christopher Robin playing ‘pooh sticks’, a game I still enjoy playing.

62	The Black Prince Adam Roberts
63	Awakenings Oliver Sacks
64	On the Move Oliver Sacks
65	The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
66	Complete Memoirs of George Sherston Siegfried Sassoon
67	Macbeth William Shakespeare
68	Gitanjali Rabindranath Tagore
69	Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
70	The Diaries of Beatrice Webb
71	The House of Mirth Edith Wharton
72	Voss Patrick White
73	The Wooden Horse Eric Williams
74	To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
75	Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

I come to the end of my list of 75, only to find that by technical error one of the most influential books of my childhood has ‘dropped off’. It is a book of poems about the kings and queens of England, given to me when I was seven. The poems are factually accurate: Henry VIII was ‘Bluff king Hal was full of beans/ he married half a dozen queens….’ At that impressionable age I remembered a lot of the poems off pat and even today, when I want to remember when a particular king or queen ruled, I mentally refer to those poems. The book also gave me a time reference — what year was Guy Fawkes? When were the wars of the roses? So, I really had 76 books.

Tony Thomas, however, came up with 141! This may be because he has a personal library of about 30,000 books. Tony says:

100+ authors and books that changed my life

(Books: one (or two or three) books, or series, for each author – often representing many others by that author.

Changed my life: a scene, a character, a feeling, an approach, a style, a world, stays with me still.)

1	J D Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye
2	Iris Murdoch	Under the Net
3	Henry Fielding	Tom Jones
4	Jonathan Swift	Gulliver’s Travels
5	Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice
6	Maurice Sendak	In the Night Kitchen
7	Peter Dickinson	Tulku
8	Sebastian Barry	Days Without End
9	Fiona Mozley	Elmet
10	Fritz Leiber	Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books
11	L Sprague de Camp (& Fletcher Pratt)	The Incomplete Enchanter
12	Tom Disch	Camp Concentration + The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
13	Philip K Dick	The Man in the High Castle
14	Hal Clement	Mission of Gravity
15	James Blish	A Case of Conscience
16	Deborah Levy	Things I Don’t Want to Know
17	Primo Levi	The Periodic Table
18	Ian McEwan	The Cement Garden
19	Tom McCarthy	C
20	Franz Kafka	The Trial
21	Anthony Powell	A Dance to the Music of Time
22	Simon Mawer	The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
23	Thomas Harris	The Silence of the Lambs
24	Julian Rathbone	Joseph
25	Michael Connelly	Bosch novels
26	Ursula K Le Guin	The Left Hand of Darkness + Earthsea novels
27	Raymond J Healy and J Francis McComas	eds Adventures in Time and Space
28	Robert A Heinlein	Stranger in a Strange Land
29	Adam Roberts	Gradisil
30	Matthew Hughes	Black Brillion
31	Kate Wilhelm	The Infinity Box + Death Qualified
32	Brian W Aldiss	Hothouse + The Malacia Tapestry
33	Simone de Beauvoir	The Second Sex
34	Christopher Priest	The Separation
35	Ray Bradbury	Something Wicked This Way Comes
36	Jack Vance	The Dragon Masters + The Dying Earth
37	Kim Stanley Robinson	Red Mars
38	Frederik Pohl (& Cyril Kornbluth)	The Space Merchants + Man Plus
39	Jo Walton	Farthing + Among Others
40	Joanna Russ	The Adventures of Alyx
41	Margaret Atwood	The Edible Woman
42	Karen Joy Fowler	We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
43	Robert Aickman	Cold Hand in Mine
44	Lord Dunsany	My Talks with Dean Spanley
45	Graham Joyce	The Tooth Fairy
46	A C Bradley	Shakespearean Tragedy
47	Jonathan Kellerman	When the Bough Breaks
48	John Grisham	The Firm
49	Donald E Westlake (Richard Stark)	Bankshot + Point Blank (The Hunter)
50	Bill James	You’d Better Believe It
51	Lee Child	Killing Floor
52	Jim Thompson	The Grifters
53	Alastair Maclean	The Guns of Navarone
54	John Buchan	The 39 Steps
55	H Rider Haggard	She
56	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Tarzan of the Apes + A Princess of Mars
57	A E Coppard	Dusky Ruth and other stories
58	Mervyn Peake	The Sword in the Stone
59	Kenneth Grahame	The Wind in the Willows
60	A Conan Doyle	A Study in Scarlet
61	Clive James	The Metropolitan Critic
62	Edmund Wilson	The Triple Thinkers + I Thought of Daisy
63	William Shakespeare	The Tempest + King Lear + Henry IV part 1
64	Anton Chekhov	The Oxford Chekhov
65	Charles Dickens	Oliver Twist
66	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita
67	Philip Roth	The Plot Against America
68	William Trevor	Collected Stories
69	Rudy Rucker	Postsingular
70	Kingsley Amis	Lucky Jim + The Alteration
71	J B Priestley	Bright Day + Literature and Western Man
72	Emile Zola	Drunkard
73	Joseph Furphy	Such Is Life
74	John Le Carré	The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
75	Garry Disher	Wyatt novels
76	Amy Witting	I for Isobel
77	Julian Barnes	Before She Met me
78	Jane Gardam	Bilgewater
79	Thomas Pynchon	V
80	John Barth	The Sot-Weed Factor
81	Samuel Johnson	Preface to Shakespeare
82	Aldous Huxley	Music at Night + essays
83	Patrick White	The Solid Mandala
84	Robert Graves	Claudius novels + Goodbye to All That, poems
85	Gore Vidal	Matters of Fact & Fiction + Myra Breckenridge
86	W H. Auden	The Dyer’s Hand + poems
87	A D Hope	The Cave and the Spring + poems
88	C S Lewis	Perelandra
89	Evelyn Waugh	Scoop
90	Richard Flanagan	The Narrow Road to the Deep North
91	Bertrand Russell	Why I Am Not a Christian
92	John Gribbin	In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat
93	Richard Dawkins	The God Delusion
94	Daniel Dennett	Consciousness Explained
95	Sam Harris	The Moral Landscape
96	A C Grayling	Ideas That Matter
97	Frank Kermode	The Age of Shakespeare + Not Entitled
98	Tim Flannery	The Weather Makers
99	Nicholson Baker	The Size of Thoughts
100	George Orwell	1984 + Collected Essays
101	John Wyndham	The Day of the Triffids + The Crysalids
102	H G Wells	The Time Machine + War of the Worlds
103	Frank Moorhouse	The Americans, Baby + Forty-Seventeen
104	J R R Tolkien	The Lord of the Rings
105	Thomas Burnett Swann	The Day of the Minotaur
106	Peter S Beagle	The Last Unicorn
107	Ian Fleming	James Bond books
108	William Golding	Lord of the Flies
109	Joseph Heller	Catch-22
110	Edgar Allen Poe	Short Stories
111	K J Parker	Mightier Than the Sword
112	Raymond Chandler	The Big Sleep
113	Lewis Carroll	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
114	Pauline Kael	I Lost It at the Movies
115	Audrey Schulman	Theory of Bastards
116	Sally Rooney	Normal People
117	Patricia Highsmith	The Talented Mr Ripley
118	Sarban	The Sound of His Horn
119	Keith Roberts	Pavane
120	David Crystal	Linguistics
121	Philip Jose Farmer	The Image of the Beast
122	William Empson	Seven Types of Ambiguity
123	David Lodge	Changing Places
124	Anthony Burgess	A Clockwork Orange
125	Ken Macleod	The Execution Channel
126	Clive Hamilton	Requiem for a Species
127	Naomi Oreskes (& Erik M Conway)	Merchants of Doubt
128	James Shapiro	Contested Will
129	Larry McMurtry	Lonesome Dove
130	Joe R Lansdale	The Bottoms + Hap & Leonard series
131	Hal Dresner	The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books
132	Andrew Ford	Composer to Composer
133	J G Ballard	Vermilion Sands + The Crystal World
134	John D MacDonald	A Deadly Shade of Gold
135	Kate Atkinson	Case Histories
136	Colin Wilson	The Outsider
137	Thorne Smith	The Night Life of the Gods
138	Walter M Miller	A Canticle for Leibowitz
139	George Macdonald Fraser	Flashman
140	Johann Wyss	The Swiss Family Robinson
141	T S Eliot	Selected Poems