My Nick Hornby moment.

Sometime ago I let things get the better of me and did something I've not done before in words, I wrote down a list of books I felt worth reading, those books that I've battered people's ears with, spoken in italics, emphasised in bold, and stabbed my fingers with conviction in the air that these are the BOOKS.

I tried to apply the brakes when I got to ten (why is ten the default maximum these days for a list, incidentally - certainly seems that like), they failed to hold and I skidded and went over, seriously over the line. Individual choice when it comes to books - just as any choice - is deeply subjective. One person's meat and so on. Therefore what I evangelise about, bang the gavel down on, comes without any guarantee; you may enjoy or wrinkle your brows out, or just ask why in that head-shaking way. Each of these books, nevertheless, has for whatever reason stopped me dead in my tracks. Transformational literature in that regard, but don't go looking in the self-help section of the local bookstore, they're not that kind of book.

Don Quixote
Affectionate and endearing, for all those prey to chivalrous delusions. You are out there, are n't you...are n't you?

Things Fall Apart

Dues finally paid to Chinua Achebe with the Man Booker prize going his way. Fantastic novel.

Skintight / Double Whammy / Tourist Season

Crime thrillers but unlike anything you might expect: eco aware and very funny. In fact, I would n't stop with just these three, I'd freely recommend about everything Carl Hiaasen has written.

If this is a Man / If not now when.

What the human spirit is capable of doing to ensure raw survival. Bluntly, essential reading. Primo Levi spent a year in a concentration camp.

Sorrows of Young Werther

A love sick misery guts; terrific writing.

Herzog.

You have no Saul Bellow on your bookshelves, none? What kind of reader are you ! How can we talk ? My favourite book by my favourite author.

One of Ours

By Willa Cather, where the prose reads like Keats.

Babbit.

I remember reading this at university, being enraptured and begging my tutor to devote a tutorial to it. The memory alone.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Years and years since I read this, no idea now of the plot; all I'm able to recall is that I never wanted it to finish. Can't beat a bit of Mario Vargas Llosa. Make sure this goes into your shopping trolley.

Manhattan '45

By Jan Morris. To write just one line of prose like hers is all that I ask of this life.

America Day by Day

THE book about the US; I ought to know, I've read most of them. There's also a very moving, haunting memoir of the last days of her mother by Simone de Beavoir that's worth getting hold of.

Anything by Tobias Woolf and Raymond Carver

Anything is n't the name of a book of theirs: it means read ANYTHING that has either name on it. The prose, the prose...

Confessions of Zeno

When I first moved to London, I spent time working in a West End fast food restaurant. Bored, fed up, over-tired and facing utter intellectual ruin, the only thing that got me and several others through was to talk about books, and as all of my colleagues were foreign, I, by chance, had an unexpected and very welcome introduction to the world of European Literature. Stop number one on that journey (and still going strong even now) was this book by Italo Svevo. I've never smoked, but this will make anyone give up, and, no, it's not that kind of confession.

House of Mirth

I'll stick my neck out here: read as much Edith Wharton as you can lay your hands on.

Christ stopped at Eboli

So there I'll be in my dotage stood in the middle of the Shepherds Bush roundabout alternately haranguing passersby to lay their hands on the Clash's London Calling, Springsteen's The River, absolutely anything by Saul Bellow, and then this book. It is that kind of book.

Bonjour Tristesse.

Francois Sagan wrote this when she was 18....unfair to be so good so young....when's my turn

Therese Raquin

Or how I got turned on to reading Zola. I read this in a day. Could not put it down. Murky, unremitting naturalism.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte's masterpiece. The other book that I read in a day and which I cannot return to; it's forever crystallised in my mind as unsurpassable...and if I go back, well, then, I might see cracks...

Property

I firmly believe that to properly understand history, it's imperative to experience it through the eyes of a fiction writer. History and it's effects have to be understood holistically, which means attempting to wrestle with motivations and individual psychologies. Property does this perfectly. How hideous the slave trade. Valerie Martin fully deserved the Orange Prize for this.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Ladies, slip a copy into your handbags, Gentleman, put this into your back pocket. Both: this'll see you through good times, bad times...

A Confederacy of Dunces
You're on the bookshop equivalent of supermarket sweep with two minutes to fill your trolley. Get this in there. The funniest book I've ever read and at the same time uniquely sad
You can breath out now, all done. I reckon this list can hold it's own against any other comparable list comfortably. But, I've not been compiling a fight card. Reading is idiosyncratic and as I wrote earlier, one person's meat is n't necessarily another's cut of choice. Enjoy.