Books

Here are some titles mentioned in essays on this site for those who have not yet read the books or those who want an excuse to read them again.

Reading software is slowly improving. I use (where I can) eReader, available free at http://www.ereader.com/ereader/software/browse.htm. I convert formats with Stanza http://www.lexcycle.com/faq or Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/. ebooks are no substitute for printed books but sometimes they are more convenient.

Richard Adams

An extraordinary writer, one who just can’t be categorised. Adams, then a senior civil servant, started writing in his 50s and produced a story originally told to his children called Watership Down. This epic fantasy was mistakenly labelled a children’s story because it dealt with rabbits, and his follow up, Shardik, disconcerted critics because it was clearly a story for adults, set in a distant time when the gods visited human beings, sometimes in terrifying form. The Girl in a Swing treats dark matter of fairy tale and fable in a tragic story that has a shattering effect. By comparison, Traveller is a wise and reflective story of the Civil War in America, told through the ‘words’ of General Robert E Lee’s horse.
Shardik doc
The Girl in a Swing doc
Traveller doc

Aristophanes
Aristophanes was a dramatist whose works were produced during the time when the Peloponnesian War was destroying the golden civilisation of Periklean Athens. They survived the years, some of them, and the most extraordinary thing about them is that they are still effective as theatre, still funny, moving, and at times very beautiful. Best seen in performance in a modern translation which sacrifices accuracy for brio.
The Birds doc

Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham inhabits a kind of mid ground, not quite a ‘golden age’ detective story writer, not quite a novelist of character and milieux, but somehow managing to be both, though at different times in her career. Her detective Albert Campion was originally a spoof of Dorothy Sayers’ sleuth, but Allingham’s tales developed to be intricately plotted tragedies of eccentric characters deployed in superbly evoked delineations of place. I’ve selected four of her best stories here.
Police at the Funeral doc
Dancers in Mourning doc
The Fashion in Shrouds doc
The China Governess doc

Jane Austen
One of the great tragedies of literature was the death of Jane Austen, one of the most brilliant of English novelists, before she could fully develop her potential. The quantum leap from Pride and Prejudice, her most popular book and a great comic novel, to the extended scenarios deployed in Mansfield Park, was followed by the wise and witty character study of Emma and the melancholic and thoughtful Persuasion. Austen had much more to offer had this development continued, but she died with work unfinished and her readers the losers.
Emma doc

Emily Bronte
Seemingly carrying on from Austen, Emily Bronte is unique in English literature, a mystical poet who created one of the most romantic yet disturbing novels written in English. The power of the writing is matched by the skillful organisation of the material, remarkable in view of her inexperience. The Brontes, like Jane Austen, wrote at first for their families, which formed a closed world. The observant and insightful intelligence of the one, and the deeply felt emotional experience of the other helped them create books of universal relevance.
Wuthering Heights doc

Angela Carter

Angela Carter was a strikingly original novelist and thinker who also wrote short stories, journalism, poetry, screenplays, plays and children’s books. Every one of her nine novels is worth reading, but her two final books, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, are her most extraordinary accomplishment, both apparently a return to traditional formats yet both infused with a modern sensibility and a truly profound intelligence.
Nights at the Circus doc

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler fused the literary novel with the dime detective story of the 30s and created a very special place, a mythical Los Angeles where a poetry quoting private eye battles it out with corrupt cops and ruthless gangsters. Chandler was a great stylist and he is always worth reading, even when his books declined as he succumbed to alcoholism. He learned his trade in the dime magazines, and his early stories are fascinating and of a very high standard. Chandler is best known for his first novel The Big Sleep, and the film that Howard Hawks made of it, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and with a script by William Faulkner.
Collected Stories doc
The Big Sleep doc
The Big Sleep script doc

Daniel Defoe
Political writer, satirist, journalist and novelist Defoe was one of the most amazingly productive writers who has ever lived. We don’t know even now how much he wrote. One story stands out, a story about a stranger in a strange land, cast adrift without any resources, who learns how to survive and triumph over his predicament. It’s a universal story with a message for us all, and has been one of the most popular stories ever written from the day it was first published.
Robinson Crusoe pdf

Philip K Dick

Probably still the greatest writer of science fiction of all time, Philip Dick really did write science fiction, not just “adventure stories set in the future”. And his later achievement can be clearly seen emerging in the large number of short stories he wrote, mainly at the start of his career while he was intent on becoming a mainstream novelist. Some of the best SF stories, one masterpiece following another, all pumped out at a furious rate to earn a buck.
Collected Stories 1 pdf
Collected Stories 3 pdf
Collected Stories 4 pdf
Collected Stories 5 pdf

Charles Dickens
There is no denying the vitality of Charles Dickens’ prose. Though sentimental even by the standards of his era, he is a master story teller and a superb plotter. His characters, no matter how caricatured, come alive off the page. His matter is outrage at the social injustice of his world, and he is the most scathing of Victorian satirists. As he developed as a novelists he made more use of symbolism to reinforce his message, and his books remain compelling reading to this day. These are my favourites.
DombeyAndSon pdf
Little Dorrit doc
Bleak House doc
Martin Chuzzlewit doc

Guy Endore

Guy Endore, screenwriter and novelist, author of the Werewolf of Paris and the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film Carefree, was also the author of imaginative biographies, one of which was about Alexandre Dumas (the father). The King of Paris treats Dumas as Dumas treated the historical figures he wrote about. It’s full of stories and anecdotes, fanciful dialogue, vivid portraits of figures of the time, and brings Dumas to life as few biographies do. The author of The Count of Monte Cristo would have appreciated this treatment of the subject.
King of Paris pdf

Kenneth Grahame
It is mistaken to categorise this deeply felt, poetic and wise story as one just for children. Rather, it is the child within us all who can best appreciate it (children are usually too old to do so). How surprising to discover every time you read it that Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad are so similar to ourselves and the people we meet every day. Kenneth Grahame must have been deeply attuned to the son to whom he originally told the story, and both stepped into the magic land of myth as the story unfolded.
Wind in the Willows doc

Patricia Highsmith
She was a misfit, a lesbian Texan who ended up in Paris then Switzerland and was comfortable nowhere. Her stories convey this sense of unease to a disturbing degree, starting with her first, Strangers on a Train, filmed by Hitchcock. Although her later work is more diffused, many of her novels are absorbing, as from innocuous beginnings she draws the reader in and involves them in the committal of a murder. Her second book, Carol (aka The Price of Salt), is a romance that is uncharacteristically sunny and quite moving.
Carol doc
Deep Water doc

Homer
Homer and his role in the formation of the books we know as The Iliad and The Odyssey is a question, one that brings up the complementary roles of the reader, the publisher and the reputation of a writer in creating a work of art. These stories of Bronze Age Greece are probably the most influential stories ever told outside the promulgation of a faith. They are most readable and absorbing, and mix realism and fantasy in a most unusual way. Prose renderings are the best way to start, for these are stories. Versions that attempt to recreate the poetry can sometimes bring out mythical and ritual elements that prose doesn’t.
The Iliad Butler pdf
The Odyssey Butler pdf

Hugh Lofting
Written and illustrated for his children, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories saw their beginning in the carnage of the First World War, where men and animals were slaughtered in massive numbers in a futile attempt to end war. The message of practising kindness to others, and pacifism, is not preached, but shown through the adventures of the kindly doctor and his family of wise and funny animals. The illustrations are exceptionally good. When you stop rereading these lovely books you will know you’ve grown too old.
The Story of Doctor Dolittle pdf
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle pdf

Ross Macdonald
Influenced by the example of Raymond Chandler in creating a fusion of literature and pulp fiction, Ross Macdonald covered similar territory. He is a more accomplished plotter, sometimes too much so for the believability of his stories. Macdonald created an iconic PI, Lew Archer, but he came to forge a particular story to perfection, one where suppressed guilt has its effects over several generations, one where the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. More than half of his output is of the very highest standard. Here are some of my favourites.
02 – The Drowning Pool doc
05 – Find a Victim doc
10 – The Zebra-Striped Hearse doc
11 – The Chill doc

Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is an author all of whose books I have read, and I will continue to do so, even though I think his early work is weak, and mannered, and his later work prone to be repetitive. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, the story of a man abandoned by his cat, then by his wife, but adopted by a series of very peculiar people indeed, I thought one of the two or three best books I had ever read, but a subsequent reading seemed to show excessive use of parallels and bizarreness for its own sake. Kafka By the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark, and many of his stories, still rank high with me. His forthcoming take on 1984, IQ84, I’m looking forward to.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle doc

Murasaki
Just what the novel is is an examination that many academics undertake for fame and higher pay, but nobody else much cares about. However, in tenth century Heian Japan an author known only by her court title, Lady Murasaki, appears to have invented a very modern version of what we today call the novel. It has superb characterisation and plotting, great insight into human nature, drama and suspense. It also has a cast of thousands,, much detail about contemporary court etiquette, many poems called tankas, and an exquisite self portrait of the author, who shines through every page of one of the longest of novels. One of the greatest novels every written, very definitely so.
Genji (Seidensticker trs) pdf

George Orwell
George Orwell was a kind of perceptive everyman who tried to bring a common sense appraisal to murky issues such as political manipulation, power politics, media misrepresentation of facts and the influences of popular culture. As well as writing some of the greatest essays in English Orwell was also an accomplished novelist. His final book was 1984, which every man, woman and child on the planet should read and reread, a kind of wake up cry of how our world could be impoverished and restricted by unscrupulous leaders. One of the world’s most important writers, Orwell is becoming more and more important to read every day.
Complete Novels doc
50 Essays doc

Mary Renault
Mary Renault was one of the formative authors of my younger days, but a recent reread of one of her books gave me the impression her treatment was at times sentimental and simplified. Despite this, her meticulous research and imaginative approach do bring the past to life as few other historical novelists succeed in doing. Her characters: Theseus, Simonides, Alexander, Socrates, may have been quite different in reality to her portraits, their world more complex, but Mary Renault has probably sparked more interest in them than any historian.
The Last Of The Wine pdf
Mask Of Apollo pdf
Fire From Heaven pdf
Praise Singer pdf

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a dramatist, and so his plays have to be seen in performance to appreciate his achievement. Some great films have been made of his plays. His output was uneven, and even his best plays have tedious or garbled passages. Not even a scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature can claim to fully understand every word he wrote. But along with the ephemeral matter of his own day, sometimes in plays often considered unperformable, occur deeply perceptive insights into character, revealed in dramatic action and expressed in striking poetry. At his best there is none better. Adaptations designed to make his plays more accessible cannot hurt him as much as bardolatry which makes every word sacred, even if incomprehensible.
William Shakespeare Plays pdf

Simenon
Simenon was a writer of psychodramas in which repressed emotion bursts forth in acts of violence. He writes with enormous compassion and deep insight into human nature, and is one of the most accomplished evokers of landscape in all fiction. His stories are empathetic explorations made from within a character suffering stress, and are convincing and compelling portraits. His books are undervalued in comparison with his Maigret detective stories, so I give some examples here.
Act of Passion doc
In Case of Emergency doc
Mr Hire’s Engagement doc
The Little Man From Archangel doc
The Murderer doc
Tropic Moon doc

Olaf Stapledon
Olaf Stapledon was a philosopher whose book on the nature of god, and of man’s perception of god, he cast in the form of a novel for reasons of accessibility. As it happened, he was a very accomplished novelist, and his story of a gestalt process which made the reason of existence and the nature of the divine comprehensible is both very moving and very beautiful. Sometimes seen as a science fiction book, it is really a novel dealing with metaphysics and faith.
StarMaker doc

Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is not an historical novelist, even though many of his books are set in the past, but rather one who explores contemporary issues through the use of historical parallels. The narrator of Creation meets Zoroaster, Socrates, the Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tsu, and Confucius, all alive according to some accounts at the same time, and reflects on the nature of political organisation and the way men live together in different societies.
Creation doc

Arthur Weigall
Arthur Weigall was an archaeologist and administrator of antiquities who turned to writing novels and popular history as a way of publicising discoveries both he and his colleagues were responsible for. He is a very adept stylist and his books make good reading even today, when later discoveries have supplemented those of his own time. Perhaps for that reason his books can still be found in print, though published first in the 20s. His books on Akhnaton, and on Sappho, are recommended.
Life & Times of Akhnaton pdf

Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde is the greatest comic dramatist in English literature but he was also a writer of many fine stories, poetry, a novel and many essays, as well as an outstanding conversationalist, and as it turned out, a martyr, one of the most significant writers of his generation. There have been many good productions of his plays, a staple of British theatre, and several excellent films, which have kept his name alive to this day. His essays and criticism are well worth reading, and he is also one of the most quotable authors who ever lived.
A Woman of No Importance pdf
An Ideal Husband pdf
Lady Windermere’s Fan pdf
The Importance of Being Ernest pdf
Intentions pdf

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is a very great writer for a number of reasons, but the aspect of her I most admire is that presented in her essays, that of a clear thinking, concerned and perceptive, civilised human being. Here are illuminating discussions of other writers, lyrical reflections on the natural world, and explorations of social and political issues that concerned her. No one comes away the poorer after reading these essays.
Collected Essays doc

©2011 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. All books are either out of copyright or unavailable in ebook format commercially. As this changes some titles may be deleted. Images and files courtesy internet resources and Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.