Reading and writing is the highest achievement of mankind.
21. Arthur C Clarke – 2001 A Space Odyssey.
This was an incredible book and film. I adored it. I went to see the film eleven times. I liked the story Arthur told about writing the book. He wrote it on set with Stanley Kubrick. Every day he would go off and write a chapter and take it to Stanley, who would read it carefully. At the end Arthur said that Stanley would turn to him and say:
‘Arthur, this is brilliant. I do not know how you manage to come up with this.’
Then he’d pause. ‘There’s just one little thing.’
Arthur said that y the time Stanley had finished with the ‘little things’ Arthur had a complete rewrite on his hands. But Stanley had managed it in a way that was not deflating.
It showed the optimism of the sixties. We were on the moon. By 2001 we would not only have a colony up there but Mars, Jupiter and Saturn would be opened up for travel as well. Well that was not to be. We stagnated.
I like the idea of the aliens altruistically helping us to evolve as apes and then later to take us a step further. I like to think of us having the capacity to improve.
22. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Stalin was a fascist monster, a tyrant who ruled with an iron fist. Any opposition was hunted out by the secret police and banished to the Gulags. It was a reign of terror. Somehow people such as Alexander found the strength to stand up to that machine. What courage. A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch tells the story of one day in that gulag in Siberia. It is chilling in more ways than one. Seemingly this was a good day.
23. Jonathon Frantzen – Freedom
I liked the story of the love affair, the misplaced marriage, the relationship and the Rock and Roll alternative life all mixed up with the environmental business and corporate world. He captured it so well.
24. Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
The front story is the doomed relationship of the butler and cook, both too repressed and proper to live a normal life. There’s is a world of place and duty. The backdrop is the relationship in the thirties between the aristocracy and the Nazis in Germany.
It is a story told with immaculate writing, nuance and touch. The amazing thing is that it took a Japanese man to observe the subtleties of the English in such detail. I was riveted.
25. Mezz Mezzrow – Really the Blues
Mezz, or Milton, as was his proper names, was a Jewish Jazz musician from New Orleans in the thirties and forties – also known as Muggles. He played clarinet and saxophone with the likes of Louis Armstrong. For a time Mezz became a slang expression for marijuana. This book is his biography and captures, in a pre-Beat manner, the underground life of the Jazz musicians. It’s full of drugs, women and song. It was wild. For anyone interested in Beat Poetry or Jazz this was the precursor. While Miller was living it up in Paris Mezz was blowing a storm in New Orleans.
