Het kwintet van Chris Priestley

Books mean different things at different times, and the effect they have is not always down to their literary merits.  I found it very difficult to list just five books and I could list another five tomorrow that meant as much to me in different ways at other times. But today, these are my five books. . .  

Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol

I have been re-reading Dickens lately.  This book would probably be on this list whenever I wrote it.  A Christmas Carolwas read to me by a teacher when I was eight or nine.  It had a huge impact on me, not just as literature but in the way it attacks greed and meanness of spirit. The seamless mix of the real and imaginary is wonderful and though – like all Dickens – it can be too sentimental, it is also very dark in places.  And one of the great opening lines of literature too - Marley was dead: to begin with.

Gerald Durrell – My Family and Other Animals

We did this book at school and though my life – like just about everyone else’s I would imagine – was totally unlike the eccentric Durrell family’s, this story of Gerald’s childhood on Corfu in the 1930s evoked memories of my own carefree childhood in Gibraltar where my father, then in the army, was stationed during the 1960s.  I read it to my son a couple of years ago and he loved it too.  It is a very funny book.

John Fowles – The Magus

Fowles seems not to be very highly regarded now, and I have never re-read this book for fear that I might spoil a youthful enthusiasm.  I think I have read all Fowles’ books and The French Lieutenant’s Woman was another I really enjoyed.  But it was The Magus that really grabbed me with its tale of a young teacher lured into a maze of mind games on a Greek Island.  When I was 20 or so I found it absolutely mesmerising.  It may not be the best book I have ever read but it was definitely one of the books that made me want to write.  Every writer wants their reader to be compelled to turn the page, and Fowles certainly did that for me.

Edgar Allen Poe – Collected Tales and Poems

Nothing quite prepares you for the strangeness of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, but if they grab you – as they did me – then they won’t easily let go. The best of his stories are superb:  William Wilson, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher.  They are hallucinogenic and disturbing and absolutely brilliant.  I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered from the effect they had on me when I first read them. Some writers change how you people your imagination.  Poe is one of those writers.

Cormac McCarthy – The Road

I could have put McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses here on another day, but The Road had a devastating effect on me when I read it recently.  This book shows how vibrant the novel still is.  It is a difficult and emotionally exhausting book to read and I would not advise approaching it without some reserves of joy, but it is a master class in writing and everyone – absolutely everyone - should read it.