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Thee's been a terrific programme over the last few weeks on the beeb where celebs come in and speak about a handful of books that mean a lot to them partly because they capture a period in their lives. I think they usually name about 6, one of which has to be a guilty pleasure.

I'll kick it off here:

Childhood:

Tootles the Taxi - A Ladybird book. I was obsessed with this a toddler, reading it endlessly. No idea why.

Teens:

Lion Adventure - one of a host of novels all with adventure in the title and written by Willard Price. I read most of them when I was about 13. A few years ago I tracked a few down to read to my son so that he too could enjoy the thrill of these books... and discovered they were actually unbelievably racist. I had to keep stopping to explain that describing people as resembling monkeys and having low intelligence because they were primitive Africans was not acceptable. I gave up after about 10 pages of book 1.

Moved to London:

Money by MArtin Amis and the Wasp Factory by Iain Banks - I could name dozens of books from this period as it was a time I was living in a hostel (15 months) with no money and I was getting through a novel about every 2 or 3 days. I've never even got close to reading anything like that many since, sadly, and the internet has practically killed my reading now.

Now:

Joseph Wambaugh - the Choirboys. Not a recent novel - it's from the ealry 70s - but the best I've read recently. A dman good read, it kickstarted an interest in cop books.

Guilty Pleasure:

You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids by Robert G Barrett - Absolute pulp fiction, about an Aussie bouncer who lives on steaks and Castlemaine XXXX. It's terrible really but I loved it and every male I leant it to enjoyed it to.

Childhood

Charlie Brown books - Charles M Shulz. Became an avid reader of them at about 9 years old. I used to shoplift them from WH Smiths after school. I identified with the gentle humour about a loser kid and his weird friends. A bit worrying at that age, really.

Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien. Was obsessed during my early teens. God knows how many times I worked my way through it. There's a richness and depth to Tolkien's world that put it head and shoulders above other fantasy fiction. He stole like crazy from ancient mythologies, but at least he stole from the best.

Late Teens

Did a huge amount of formative reading after leaving school. From many contenders I'd pick 1. Ulysses - James Joyce, if only because being able to read and enjoy it proved something to me about myself (it's great too, though) and 2. Naked Lunch - William S Burroughs - bewildering, funny, disgusting, mad, paranoid, sad and even, at times, boring. Realising that "literature" contained stuff like this oddly made me more receptive to mainstream lit.

Adulthood

The Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the face of it, this book is pretty dry stuff about philosophy of language, yet it has haunted me for the best part of 25 years now. The cryptic, labyrinthine discussion of meaning and mind can easily allow you to miss that it's profoundly at odds with the prevailing spirit of our age.

Recent

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad. Took me a long time to get round to Conrad and now I wonder why. Nostromo's a dazzling, amazingly modern novel about the intrusion of the industrialised West into a (fictional) South American backwater. The relevance to today hardly needs spelling out. Shame the last 20 pages are (by universal admission) pretty rubbish.

Guilty Pleasure

Don't really have one. I tend to get my fix of trash culture from TV and films. I can watch any amount of awful zombie or sci-fi movies, but I'd struggle to read a sci-fi novel.

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Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.
Wittgenstein Blog: http://lwpi.blogspot.com/

As a small child Ladybird stuff like Chicken Licken.
The Hungry Caterpiller
And a book about ladybirds making bikes from blades of grass... I don't remember it's name.

Anything by Roald Dahl.

Then - Enid Blyton Secret Seven then Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree and the 'Adventure series.

Got a bit fed up with books after that. So it was either stuff I had to read at school or non fiction stuff. I don't read fiction at all really.

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Definitely isn't inbred...has the GCSEs to prove it!

REVOLUTION PURITY LOVE SUICIDE ACCURACY

http://www.thesoundofconfusion.com

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Jarvis Cocker or David Bowie or AVB or Johnny Borrell, she isn't picky

Cavey Cocker, Cup Cake Queen, Saint Thomas.

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Pukka Pie pest

Embrace the margin
Always Changing at Retford http://sptxx.tumblr.com/
Not Changing at Retford http://sptxx2.tumblr.com/

Childhood
One, Two, Three and Away… Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat and so on.

Pre-teens
Early pre-teens, mostly Enid Blyton, like The Magic Faraway Tree (read at a time when a book containing the names Fanny and Dick failed to raise a giggle) and anything by Dick King Smith – The Hodgeheg, The Sheep Pig, Willie the Swowse… Must have read The Witches by Roald Dahl several times, and A House Inside Out by Penelope Lively was probably my favourite book.

Teens
Adrian Mole, of course.

Late Teens
Dabbled with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing. Quite liked Nick Hornby... then I discovered Jack Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy, which was and remains my favourite book ever (recently back in print, hurrah!).

Early 20s
Dave Eggers, Toby Litt. A bit of Susan Sontag.

Now
Evelyn Waugh, AL Kennedy, Anthony Cartwright, Virgina Woolf.

_________________
Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.
Wittgenstein Blog: http://lwpi.blogspot.com/

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Curmudgeonly Rock 'n' Roll time traveller from ye olden days

2nd verse same as the 1st...

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Curmudgeonly Rock 'n' Roll time traveller from ye olden days

2nd verse same as the 1st...

(As BJ wasn't single nominations, the most important ones are in bold.)

Childhood

In books it was Willard Price again. I didn’t realise there was any racism but you’re a bit blind to it at 10. Read every volume of a junior encyclopedia at that age as well. Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man.

Teens

Horror fiction – Squirm, the Rats, the Fog, passed around by us teens, with the pages including sex turned down (and there was a lot of it in James Herbert books). Pan horror anthologies. Stephen King books up to It. The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy. Animal Farm. All the All Creatures Great and Small novels.

Adulthood

Part of my university course was literature so read some excellent 20th century Russian and American literature – favourites were everything by Bulgakov (Master and Margarita is my fave book of all time), all John Irving’s books, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, the Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. In my first flatshare in London, someone recommended John Cowper Powys, which was 600 pages of dull (but I never give up books when I’ve started one).

Now

Read a lot of non-fiction now. But more recently read Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life and Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

Guilty Pleasure

Sven Hassel. Read all his novels and could answer questions on Mastermind about them. I even tried to join the Wehrmacht but they didn't have a 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment.

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Alas, not actually Gryff Rhys Jones...

"Little Jack Horner sitting on the corner
With no shoes and clothes
This aint funny, but he took his money
And sniffed it up his nose"

_________________
Definitely isn't inbred...has the GCSEs to prove it!

REVOLUTION PURITY LOVE SUICIDE ACCURACY

http://www.thesoundofconfusion.com

_________________
God is a word and the argument ends there

_________________
Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.
Wittgenstein Blog: http://lwpi.blogspot.com/