Reading is one of the most pleasurable experiences in life. You can travel the whole universe, back and forth in time, through dimensions that may not be real to places in other universes all while sitting in your own armchair.
You can see places more vividly, meet people from the past, present and future that you didn’t know existed, and understand things you did not know you needed to.
All the greatest minds and best thoughts of all of mankind are laid out before you. You can tuck in.
Overindulgence has no harmful effects.
It is an addiction that it is not necessary to control.
My favourite fiction writers include: Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Attwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Iain Banks, John Fowles, John Steinbeck, D H Lawrence, Ken Kesey, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, George Orwell, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Stephen King, Andrea Levy, Will Self, Norman Mailer, Gerald Durrell, Spike Milligan and a string of others too numerous to mention.
Books I have read since retiring Sept 2011
| 1.Just Kids | Patti Smith |
| 2. Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel |
| 3. Norwegian Wood | Haruki Murakami |
| 4. Kafka on the Shore | Haruki Murakami |
| 5. Maggie Girl of the Streets | Stephen Crane |
| 6. Great Singers of the 2oth Century | David Spiller |
| 7. East of Eden | John Steinbeck |
| 8. God is not Great | Christopher Hitchins |
| 9. The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho |
| 10. Full Dark No Stars | Stephen King |
| 11. 3 Cups of Tea | Greg Mortenson & David Relin |
| 12. Birdie | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 13. 11.22.63 | Stephen King |
| 14. IQ84 – Book 1 | Haruki Murakami |
| 15. IQ84 – Book 2 | Haruki Murakami |
| 16. IQ84 – Book 3 | Haruki Murakami |
| 17. Good Man Jesus scoundrel Christ | Philip Pullman |
| 18. After dark | Haruki Murakami |
| 19. After the quake | Haruki Murakami |
| 20. Long walk to forever | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 21. The Optimist | Lawrence Shorter |
| 22. The Atheist’s Bible | Joan Konner |
| 23. The portable Atheist | Christopher Hitchins |
| 24. The vanishing elephant | Haruki Murakami |
| 25. Salmonella men on planet porno | Yasutaka Tsutsui |
| 26. The Chrysalids | John Wyndham |
| 27. Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| 28. A long way down | Nick Hornby |
| 29. Blind willow, sleeping woman | Haruki Murakami |
| 30. My dear I wanted to tell you | Louisa Young |
| 31. Grimus | Salman Rushdie |
| 32. South of the border West of the sun | Haruki Murakami |
| 33. The Return | Victoria Hislop |
| 34. Stonemouth | Iain Banks |
| 35. The girl at the Lion D’Or | Sebastian Faulks |
| 36. The Long Song | Andrea Levy |
| 37. Underground | Haruki Murakami |
| 38. My Family and other animals | Gerald Durrell |
| 39. One Flew over the Cuckoos nest | Ken Kesey |
| 40. Hard boiled Wonderland and the end of the world | Haruki Murakami |
| 41. Red | Gary Neville |
| 42. The colour of Magic | Terry Pratchett |
| 43. The light fantastic | Terry Pratchett |
| 44. Dance Dance dance | Haruki Murakami |
| 45. Portnoy’s complaint | Philip Roth |
| 46. The lost Symbol | Dan Brown |
| 47. Guards Guards | Terry Pratchett |
| 48. What I talk about when I talk about running | Haruki Murakami |
| 49. A Maggot | John Fowles |
| 50. Who I am | Pete Townsend |
| 51. The story of Free & Bad Company | Steven Rosen |
| 52. Sputnik Sweetheart | Haruki Murakami |
| 53. Mr Stone and the knights companion | V S Naipal |
| 54. The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot |
| 55. Mister God, I am Anna | Finn |
| 56. The Birthday book | Haruki Murakami |
| 57. A precocious autobiography | Yevgeny Yevtushenko |
| 58. The wind-up bird chronicles | Haruki Murakami |
| 59. Siddharta | Herman Hesse |
| 60. Hydrogen Sonatta | Iain M Banks |
| 61. The bonesetters daughter | Joy Tan |
| 62. Keep the Asphidistr flying | George Orwell |
| 63. Birds, animals and friends | Gerald Durrell |
|
Gerald Durrell |
| 65. Andy Warhol Diaries | Andy Warhol |
| 66. First born | Arthur C Clarke |
| 67. Sweettooth | Ian McEwan |
| 68. Arguably | Christopher Hitchins |
| 69. Bring up the bodies | Hilary Mantell |
| 70. Equal Rites | Terry Pratchett |
| 71. Mort | Terry Pratchett |
| 72. Cutting for stone | Aham Verghese |
| 73. Sourcery | Terry Pratchett |
| 74. The particular sadness of lemon cake | Aimee Bender |
| 75. The dovekeepers | Alice Hoffman |
| 76. The Ginger Man | J P Donleavy |
| 77. The great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald |
| 78. Dharma bums | Jack Kerouac |
| 79. For whom the bell tolls | Ernest Hemmingway |
| 80. A wild sheep chase | Haruki Murakami |
| 81. Fug you | Ed Sanders |
| 82. A hat full of sky | Terry Pratchett |
| 83. Ring world | Larry Niven |
| 84. Wintersmith | Terry Pratchett |
| 85. The Quarry | Iain Banks |
| 86. Stoner | John Williams |
| 87. Blowing the Blues | Dick Heckstall-Smith |
| 88. The heart of things | A C Grayling |
| 89. Things the Grandchildren should know | Mark Oliver Everett |
| 90. Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 91. The Comfort of Strangers | Ian McEwan |
| 92. The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| 93. Tarantula | Bob Dylan |
| 94. Bound for glory | Woody Guthrie |
| 95. Flaubert’s parrot | Julian Barnes |
| 96. Talking it over | Julian Barnes |
| 97. Raw spirit | Iain Banks |
| 98. The favourite game | Leonard Cohen |
| 99. Beautiful losers | Leonard Cohen |
| 100. Corrections | Jonathan Frantzen |
| 101. The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| 102. The three Musketeers | Alexander Dumas |
| 103. After the flood | Margaret Atwood |
| 104. Hellraiser | Ginger Baker |
| 105. A Casual Vacancy | JK Rowling |
| 106. Wind through the Keyhole | Stephen King |
| 107. The Ragged Trousered Philantropists | Robert Tressell |
| 108. Maddadam | Margaret Atwood` |
| 109. Ringworld Engineers | Larry Niven |
| 110. The sense of an ending | Julian Barnes |
| 111. Ringworld children | Larry Niven |
| 112. Breakfast of champions | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 113. The blind assassin | Margaret Atwood |
| 114. The Midwich Cuckoos | John Wyndham |
| 115. The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine |
| 116. Wyrd Sisters | Terry Pratchett |
| 117. Juliet Naked | Nick Hornby |
| 118. Confessions of a crap artist | Philip K Dick |
| 119. Doctor Sleep | Stephen King |
| 120. White Rooms & imaginary Westerns | Pete Brown |
| 121. Moral disorder | Margaret Atwood |
| 122. The hare with amber eyes | Edmund de Waal |
| 123. Apocalypse | D H Lawrence |
| 124. The Cosmological eye | Henry Miller |
| 125. The last continent | Terry Pratchett |
| 126. Thud | Terry Pratchett |
| 127. A tale for the time being | Ruth Ozeki |
| 128. Survivor | Chum Mey |
| 129. Falling leaves | Adeline Yen Mah |
| 130. |
I have read voraciously through the whole of my life. It has given me more pleasure than any other activity. I know – I know – but a book will last for hours!
It is not unusual for people to ask me what my favourite books were and I’d trot them out. There were the usual suspects:
Jack Kerouac – Dharma Bums and On the Road
John Fowles – Magus
John Steinbeck – East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath
Ken Kesey – Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
DH Lawrence – Sons & Lovers, Women in Love & Lady Chatterley’s
Henry Miller – Tropic of Capricorn
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World and Island
George Orwell – 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Jerry Rubin – Do It!
Robert Sheckley – Journey Beyond Tomorrow
Larry Niven – Ringworld
Kurt Vonnegut Jnr – Breakfast of Champions and Ice Nine
Plus a few hundred more!
Then I got to thinking and I realised that a number of these books that I had revered I had read in my teens and early twenties. That meant that I had not read them for over forty years.
I decided that it would be good to go back and see if they were as good as I remembered them being. So I began to intersperse them with my current reading. Do you know what I discovered? Half of them had obviously been rewritten by inferior writers over the intervening years.
So come on you publishers – I want the original books back that I loved so much! Many of these are nowhere near as good as they were!
Re written? …Really? How curious…what sort of thing? L btw
I can’t see any Jasper Fforde??? If you havent read him then you should really start straight away… The Thursday Next series… LOVE it!
Hi Virginie good to hear from you! Who is Jasper Fforde?? Fill me in!
Hi there! He is a British writer that I have discovered by complete chance, here in our local library in Québec city! The Thursday Next series is satirical, absurd, philosophical and literary Sci-fi, yes all of that and more. He has been compared to Terry Pratchett, but seriously, he is even better…
Thanks Virginie – he sounds great. I shall check him out and read some! I hope you like all my books! I remember you reading Green all those years ago! What do you think to the website?
Sorry I haven’t had time to read your other books yet. But I had loved Green, so will certainly check them out soon…
Let me know what you think once you’re read some Jasper Fforde…
Hi Virginie – great to hear from you. I have bought six of Jasper’s books on your recommendation! I’ve got a few books lined up to read first but I’ll get on to them soon. I’ll let you know what I think.
I’m glad you like Green. Perhaps you could leave a review on Amazon. It might encourage someone to buy one!
My other books are a bit extreme and quirky. Beware the warnings! I’ve published thirteen so far. I’m working on the Anthropocene Apocalypse and hope to get that published by the end of this week. Then I’m fine tuning my education one. Then the Roy Harper one. By Christmas I hope to have twenty out there.
That’s funny: “Half of them had obviously been rewritten by inferior writers over the intervening years.” Did you know that John Fowles created a slightly modified version of The Magus? In particular, he clarified the ending.
Hi Steve – no I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check that out. I always thought the ending was a bit weak. Perhaps he sorted that out a bit. Thanks for letting me know.
The original version was published in 1965, the revised version in 1977.
I’ll hunt that out. It was one of my favourite books. It’s due a reread.