I read Betsy Byars' "The Eighteenth Emergency" at junior school and is my first favourite novel that I still love. Byars' books often present the melancholy of childhood with irreverent humour. This was my very first experience of writing truly speaking to me.
First read Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" at school. Its tale of domestic horror, of what people in a household do each other ladled with a dash of Gothic has an unforgettable cruelty and atmosphere. Everyone goes on about Heathcliff and Cathy, but that's only half the story as it is also about their poisonous legacy. Romantic? Pfft.
It seems that George Orvwell's "1984" will always be prescient.
Marlon James' "A Brief History of Seven Killings" is a brand new favourite. Its multi-prespectives and prose are often breath-taking.
It was only on a second read that I realised the humour in "The Remains of the Day", and how truly sad it is in conclusion, speaking of a life lost to repression. Maybe that's to do with getting older?
When I was studying Holocaust fiction at university, I read a lot of devastating text, but it was Robert Frister's memoir "The Cap, or a price of a life" that made my blood run cold and my draw drop in equal measure.
The density, plotting, era recreation and obsessive undertow of James Ellroy's work is stunning, and although his later work can verge on the impregnable, it was "L.A. Confidential" that made me a fan.
I read Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in my early teens. I already knew science-fiction was the brainiest (that it wasn't just pulp) but Dick's work told me that no matter how dazzling the future would be, downbeat societies and human existential angst would be a constant.
Every chapter in Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum" felt like a novel in itself. (And the film barely covered much of it.)
John Ajvide Lindqvist's "Let the Right One In" is just a definitive horror bildungsroman. (And the film couldn't cover all of it.)
No comments:
Post a Comment