Charlotte Bronte's JANE EYREAtmosphere, mystery, excitement, a deeply passionate love story and the most compelling and attractive hero in literature. This book has everything for me, and is, rather than Wuthering Heights, the true Bronte masterpiece.
Stephen King's INSOMNIAThis isn't my favourite King novel (and it's one King himself is believed to dislike) but the underlying idea behind the plot -that of four great forces governing the universe - life, death, purpose and random - is one of the most imaginative I've ever come across - and something I find disturbingly credible. I also like the way King makes his action hero and heroine two people in their seventies - a feat very few thriller writers could pull off.
Elizabeth Von Armin's THE ENCHANTED APRILThis is a tremendously warm and uplifting book. Four women, strangers to each other at the outset, rent a castle in Italy for the month of April. Very little happens; and yet the life of each is completely turned around. Thriller writers rely almost totally upon plot and action to keep their books moving along and consequently, I'm in awe of a writer who can produce such an engaging and enthralling story out of so little action.
Thomas Harris's SILENCE OF THE LAMBSSimple, compelling and totally terrifying, this is possibly the best thriller ever written. If it didn't invent the notion of the fascinating, strangely engaging serial killer, it certainly gave it a new lease of life. Hannibal Lector is the perfect anti-hero - we are mesmerized and repulsed by him in equal measure and the beautiful, brave Clarice is a wonderful foil for him. Later in his working life, Harris developed quite an elaborate and beautiful style of prose, which I very much admire, but the language in this early book is quite stark - and all the more powerful for being so.
Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALSThe aspect of literature I find most inspiring, that pushes me to keep going, to produce something that bit better, is that which stretches the human imagination beyond what I'd have believed possible. I love these three books so much: polar bears and witches, parallel worlds that are reached through the aurora borealis, people whose souls take animal form, warriors that ride on dragon-flies. I must have read the complete trilogy at least four times and still can't claim to fully understand it. Dust? What is that really? And the goodies and baddies - still haven't sorted all them out yet. They're not perfect books, but they're works of sheer genius all the same. I know that I'll be reading them until the day I die.
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