Probably.
In objective terms, any list such as this one is nonsense. What I really mean to say is My Favourite Ten Books, or Ones That Made an Impression on Me at Some Moment in Time, and Why You Should Read Them Too, which isn’t as pithy or clickbait-friendly as The Ten Greatest Books of All Time but— You get the point.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s classic about Atticus Finch's attempts to prove the innocence of Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama, is a book that was both a bestseller, critical darling and multiple award-scooper. A very rare novel indeed.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” A story of childhood in a sleepy everytown in the southern United States that is, by turns, warm and funny despite its subject matter, and harrowing and complex despite its satire. As a moralistic painting of a racist era we naively thought was long-past it has no rival.
Writing from the point of view of a child, whilst also allowing the reader access to the moral ironies and darkness of adults and the so-called ‘justice system’ of creaking courthouses, is no mean feat, and all the more amazing considering Harper Lee only wrote the one book, acknowledging that there was only one way for her career to go after its success (Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of Mockingbird, doesn’t detract from her legacy but I’m certainly not alone in believing it should never have been published).
A book as important now as it has ever been.
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene goes first person (a point of view he hadn’t used prior to this, his most autobiographical novel) in his story of Maurice Bendrix’s affair with a married woman, Sarah Miles, and the V-1 bomb that explodes outside Bendrix’s apartment, inspiring, yes, the end of the affair.
It’s hard to explain this book’s power over me. I have read it more than once, so it is not purely some lingering attachment to a younger time that can so often determine an affection for art that compels me to rate it so highly. The majesty of Greene’s prose and the conflict within his troubled characters, its construction and pacing, its attention to detail, the furtive dialogue both spoken and unspoken - everything comes together to create a masterwork of guilt, jealousy, love and hate. It is a book of impeccably balanced contradictions, both secular and religious, romantic and callous, an idea as focused on big ideas as it is human romance, and is all the more moving for it.
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.” In my mind, it rivals Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse as the most detailed examination of love the twentieth century produced.
Great Expectations
Some amateur called Charles Dickens babbles on about the childhood and young adult years of orphan Pip, a blacksmith's apprentice in a country village who suddenly comes into a large fortune but never forgets the girl who rejected him.
There are people who struggle with Dickens and I have sympathy for them. He was never a man to choose the easiest way of saying something, but that artistry with words and those complex, parenthetical phrases are like joyful codes that break themselves once you’re acquainted with them and reveal the author to be a more than delightfully amusing companion. Dickens can’t simply say, for example, that Pip’s five brother’s died at birth, he instead conjures an image of ‘five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside (Pip’s parents’) grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle.’
Even those who haven’t read the book, are surely aware of Miss Havisham and her wedding dress, who is so crucial to Pip’s future happiness, or Magwitch the convict, testament to just how ingrained the story has become in our literary consciousness. These characters populate a touching, human book which weaves together Dickens’ favourite themes - wealth and poverty, good and evil, love and rejection - into a cyclical, satisfying, almost mathematically-constructed masterpiece.
Fahrenheit 451
A dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury detailing a future society where books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn any that are discovered. A scathing commentary on censorship and mass media, hedonism and illiteracy which, sadly, with its thematic warning of only ever believing what you hear, will probably always be relevant. It became the topic of controversy when, ironically, a censored version of the book was in distribution of which its author, an outspoken adherent of freedom of speech, had no notion.
It is a slight (about 200 pages) but hectic book that accurately predicts flat-screen TVs, cashpoints and ear-bud headphones, with a hero who turns the full one-eighty and rejects his ‘fireman’ status to join a group of intellectual exiles outside the city who have all taken books to memory in order to preserve them. Mechanical hounds and missing neighbours give this cold-war sci-fi an air of creeping dread throughout.
‘Cram them full of noncombustible data,’ Bradbury writes, ‘chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.'
Yet again, we are faced with a warning from history that is as important today as ever. In order to prevent change, the fictional government of Bradbury’s dystopian world is desperate to suppress dissenting ideas, ergo: fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books burn.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Shakey’s longest play, concerning Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle Claudius, who hath murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother. You know the one: the stabbing behind the curtain; ‘to be or not to be’; the attendant misquotes related to Yorick’s skull; that bit Withnail shouts at zoo animals.
Shakespeare, I’ll admit, is an acquired taste, like Michelangelo, say, or The Beatles. These guys are considered the best for a reason. Some will plump for MacBeth as the Bard’s greatest but I’ll always go for Hamlet. Why do actors consider playing The Dane a crowning achievement? It’s because no other fictional character is so aware of his own intellect, or finds himself as resolutely imprisoned by it. Is he mad or too clever for his own good? Hamlet is flawed, complex beyond interpretation and, when he falls, he takes almost the entire cast with him. The words he speaks are a gift from a master at the height of his powers and there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. It is a play constantly reinterpreted and subject to endless adaptations and critical scrutiny.
Its detractors claim that Hamlet's hesitation to kill his uncle while in the act of prayer is merely a plot device to prolong the action, but I will die on the hill that argues it shows an effective, nay genius, dramatisation of the complex metaphysical and ethical arguments that infect premeditated regicide and cold-blooded revenge.
But, you know, toMAYto, toMAHto.
I have added a comments section below that doesn't require a sign-in, should anybody feel the need to argue for or against any of my dubious selections thus far....
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