Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘The Sirens of Titan’ is the single most influential read of my life. I stumbled across it when I was eleven years old, and it made me realise that I really, really, wanted to be a writer. I love pretty much all of Vonnegut – his deceptively simple prose, the way his ideas seem to wander, plotlessly, until they suddenly all slam together, pages from the end, in breathtakingly clear confluence – but this one, with its huge-ranging subject-matter, wild imagination and eccentric characters, has a special place in my heart. It also, I think, set me on the road to atheism. I still read it again from time to time; it’s like getting into a warm bath.
If anyone ever tells me they want to write, I always tell them to read ‘Misery’ by Stephen King before they start. Ostensibly a straightforward horror novel, it’s so much more than that: it is, in fact, the most articulate account of how it feels to be a writer I’ve ever come across. The frustration with publishers and editors, the relentless self-criticism, the punishments meted out for not conforming, the awful, itchy sense that you’re somehow trapped by what you’re doing... it’s all there. Plus, King, at his best, is one of the most deviously manipulative users of language writing today, and can leave you with interesting dreams for weeks after you’ve read him.
Primo Levi’s poetically-written memoir of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man, should be required reading for anyone who can read at all. Not simply because of the subject-matter, this is one of the most effective, chilling, pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. No statistics or photographs can convey the emotional reality of the Nazi death-camps in the way this beautifully-constructed first-hand account, with its minute detail and startling clarity, manages to do. Just thinking about this book makes me tearful.
I am a Londoner, both emotionally and physically; as a miserable provincial teenager, I kept myself going with dreams of the capital. Decades on, I still adore my adopted city with absurd romanticism. Peter Aykroyd's semi-supernatural murder-mystery, Hawksmoor , remains the most atmospheric love-letter to this powerful and ancient metropolis I’ve read. Predicated on the idea that the architect of London’s breathtaking white wedding-cake churches earned his genius through less-than-holy methods, this is a lyrical, disturbing, clever book that will stay with you for life.
Finally, if you enjoy being scared white, then Henry James’s terrifying novella, The Turn of the Screw, does the job magnificently. I’ve never particularly enjoyed James’s novels of society, but his psychological ghost stories are second-to-none, and this is the best of all of them. A governess takes charge of two disturbed children in an echoing house filled with weird servants. The cleverness lies in the fact that you never really know, even at the end, whether the phenomena she observes come from outside, or inside, her head. This is a touchstone for things I want to achieve in my own writing. But don’t read it alone.
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