4 Books I Love
Picking your four all-time favourite books is an impossible ask. So I’m glad no one asked. Here, instead, are four random books who batted their spines at me from the shelves today. I love them all, and here’s why…
THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES
by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury is my favourite writer. I met him once and, tongue-tied and paralysingly British, I tried to tell him this. He gave me a huge, warm handshake in return and it felt like a squeeze from God. It’s not just that carnival of an imagination that I admire. It’s the way that he makes his words work, line by line, dancing and detonating at his command. The Martian Chronicles, his collection of Red Planet stories, makes poetry out of the industrial steel and fire of rocketships. Just look at the opening to the chapter titled The Third Expedition: “The ship came down from space. It came from the stars, and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.” Isn’t that wonderful? The sheer potency of those words, the black velocities, the shining movements, so strange and mysterious and awesome. Bradbury’s Mars is a lonely place but I love visiting its red wastes and ruined cities. It’s science fiction for the heart.
BOY’S LIFE
by Robert R McCammon
“I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians.” Frankly I was sold from the moment I read that line. There’s something almost mantra-like about it, isn’t there? Or maybe it’s an invocation to the storytelling gods: an enchantment; a writer casting a hex. Whatever the case, Boy’s Life earns McCammon legitimate status as a magician. He’s best known for his horror stories and this nostalgic evocation of small town America feels like an aberration in his catalogue, albeit a glorious one (I suspect it’s his most personal novel). Clearly inspired by Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, it captures the alternating currents of childhood, the light and the dark. It’s the world through the prism of a kid’s imagination, alchemising his hometown into a heightened realm of ghosts and gunfighters, dark queens and dinosaurs, river monsters and alien invaders. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1992 but feels ridiculously overlooked. Go find it.
JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL
by Susanna Clarke
You didn’t so much settle down to read Susanna Clarke’s brilliant brick of a novel as plan an ascent, ensuring you had all the oxygen you needed to make it from base camp to the summit. But for a book that’s over 1000 pages long this tale of duelling Regency magicians is impressively light on its feet. Clarke has a dry, frequently black wit – I still smirk at her throwaway reference to a necromantic play titled ‘Tis Pity She’s A Corpse – and its sprawl of characters is vivid, nowhere more so than the gentleman with the thistledown hair, a malevolent ambassador from Faerie who feels as though he could step out of the words and steal your soul on any given page. It’s an astonishing work in the margins, too: Clarke fabricates an entire history of English magic through the novel’s 185 footnotes. And it’s magic – the roots of magic, deep in the country’s soil – that give this book its strange gravity. It’s built for long winter evenings, full of candlelight and creaking wood.
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
Sometimes our relationship to the books we love changes as we get older. I first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a teenager and Adams’ wit felt as young and as smartarse as I was. On the first page we’re told about a girl sitting in a small café in Ricksmanworth, who “finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.” Alas the Earth is demolished before she has a chance to reach a phone and tell anyone her splendid idea. At 15 that was the kind of waspish black comedy that made me snort. I read the same page, the exact same words, a couple of years ago and it just seemed crushingly sad. There’s a real existential melancholy to Adams that we often miss because his jokes are so brilliant and his imagination so magnetic. In the ‘90s I saw him read a passage from the book in Cardiff Waterstones. Halfway through he stopped reading and turned his back on the crowd. He stood like that for half a minute, his shoulders heaving as his towering frame shuddered. When he faced us again his eyes were streaming. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t read that bit in years and I’d forgotten how funny it was…” I loved him for that.