My Top Five Books

The Greatest Books I've Ever Read


Ok so I thought I would get the ball rolling with a top five selection of my favourite books and why I think they are the best, and while the premise might be unoriginal hopefully the literature I've chosen will be more interesting.


1/ Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
One of the seminal classics of Modernism, Steppenwolf holds a lofty status with both academics and general readers alike. I myself discovered the novel, after having my own peculiar existential angst while studying my A levels when I was nineteen. Reading it was like looking into a reflection of my own soul. Harry Haller is a man but he is also a wolf. When he is a man he loves art, poetry and all that is beautiful. When he is a wolf he is a savage caught in despair, who derides culture, scoffs at the sublime, and shuns other people. Rather than a strange isolated individual, in truth, Haller's fractured soul is actually a sign of the times and emblematic of the chaotic zeitgeist of the twentieth century. Consumerism, Materialism, War, and Politics, Harry Haller is a vessel which carries the collective disease of Western society. Only by reconciling himself to the world around him can he unite the wolf and man in his own spirit, but the process is one fraught with terrible pain. However, with the help of his prostitute friend Hermine, and the Jazz swinging musician Pablo, he attempts just this. Is the Magic Theatre, a Drug induced vision, a storytelling device, or an actual spirit world? We can never truly tell, but  Haller must watch the kaleidoscopic show and even be the main actor, if he is to discover his destiny. Machine guns, the Kama sutra, Chess, and the Marvellous Taming of the Steppenwolf all await him. Only through this pathway of magic can he unite his divided personality and redeem the collective world around him. Before Paulo Coelho there was Hesse.

2/ The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is one the greatest works of literature ever, and although a hefty read at nine hundred pages its worth it. Dostoevsky was clearly a genius but also as insane as the characters he delineates. Everything is here in this novel: Joy, suffering, life, death, God and the Devil and all come together to present a magisterial vision of reality and all it encompasses. Fyodor Pavlovich is the the hapless father of three brothers, Dmitry the emotionally unstable soldier, Ivan the aloof intellectual, and Alyosha, the pious monk. He is also the father of shadowy illegitimate fourth child Smerdyakov. After their father is murdered by the last, each brother will change radically, and learn the deepest darkest secrets of their own souls as they come to grips with their own guilt and culpability. Dostoevsky is parallel to Dickens in his character construction but there is nothing bourgeois or middle class about them. They are mad, bad and dangerous. However, one character of this novel stands out above the rest and this is Ivan. His pivotal chapters of 'Rebellion' and the 'Grand Inquisitor' are remarkable and truly worthy of canonical status. The former is utterly devastating, and one of the most upsetting thing I've ever read. The latter is is a prescient allegory of tyranny and the abuse of power. Blasphemous, and utterly horrifying Ivan's treatise lies at the heart of the book. Why are we cruel to each other, why does evil exist, why do children suffer? These are the eternal questions that must be answered before anything else. Dostoevsky was a deeply religious man, but no matter how much justification he puts into the Christian faith, the brothers outrageously defy its theology and standing above all is the greatest, the insane Ivan Karamazov.


3/ Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
I don't think there is any book, at least of the English canon, that equals Emily Bronte's in passion. While the nineteenth century was cluttered with the likes of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Wordsworth, a nineteen year old girl blew the lid of the status quo. It is astonishing such a dark violent and painful work could be written at all, not least by a teenager. What to say of Cathy and Heathcliff? Both seem deeply unlikable. Catherine is spoilt, emotionally unstable, and a narcissist, Heathcliff is a violent, vengeful sadist. These are not human beings in the usual sense, but like Dostoevsky's character they embody an ideal, or a primordial emotion that they push to the absolute limit. This emotion is not love, but suffering for despite the fact that both characters are 'in love', in truth, their relationship is forged out of mutual pain. Despite all, we cannot help but forgive both Cathy and Heathcliff, because buried deep beneath their warped behaviours are children, who have been so traumatised by their environment, that they have have never learnt to become adults. The ultimate novel of broken homes and dysfunctional families, Bronte's novel is unprecedented. We get the sense that Nelly's remark is true. The ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff will never die but continue to rage and burn with the fire of their inner hurt for eternity.

4/ The Road, Cormac Mccarthey
Some may prefer Blood Meridian because its violence is shocking, its evil harrowing. There is no one quite like 'The Judge' in literature. He is the ultimate expression of nihilism and misanthropy, and the whole story is a phantasmagoria of his own warped ideology. Nevertheless the Road does it for me and does so because stylistically I think its better. The language is pristine, and contains a Dantesque and Miltonic grandeur unique to postmodern literature. The themes are not so obvious, but the imagery is powerfully eidetic, meaning Mccarthey makes us envision what we read in all its sensual qualities. What we see is sad, beautiful and scary. Here we have a world that has deconstructed itself into an abyss. We do not need to know what happened, all we need to know is that life has been stripped of all illusions and all thats left is the ossified relics. The ashy windrows, the skeletal trees, the godless men who have taken Nietzsche's doctrine of power to heart. Despite this, their is a strand of hope left somewhere, a tiny glimmer of beauty and a sparkle of love, that ultimately affirms life even in the darkest hour. This is literature at its best. Art should not just reflect the world's ugliness but ultimately find a way to redeem it. The man and boy are emblems of this redemption, they contain within them all that is lost and all that remains. The man tells the boy All things of beauty are born in pain, and I would say much the same when looking at this work.

5/ The Shining, Stephen King
It won't be ranked as a seminal work of great literature but it's a novel I love very much. I was looking through old boxes in my loft one day when I found a tatty copy of the shining. The cover depicted a demonic looking face complete with blue skin and blood red eyes. I was only about twelve at the time but was quietly thrilled. Once I started reading it I was hooked, and it ushered me into a devilish world governed only by malevolent spirits. For me, the most fascinating idea presented in the novel, is of degeneration, and that we are all capable of evil given the right circumstances. The first few chapters where Danny is having visions of his rampaging father staggering down the hallways of the overlook hotel, with a mallet is truly terrifying and makes the blood run cold. This is a evil without restraint, but the depth of each character is remarkable. Unlike Jack Nicholson, who portrays Jack Torrance as a evil psychopath just waiting to cause havoc from the beginning, in this novel, king creates the father as complex character. We are there with him and his family, privy to the same claustrophobia, the same terror, and the same cabin fever. Ultimately like the characters we can see the situation spiralling out of control, but are unable to stop it. The genius of king is he has taken the the most frightening elements of Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and H.P Lovecraft, and transported them into a modern setting of contemporary America. Evil is not in the long forgotten past, or the distant reaches of the world, but here on are own back door. The ghosts and goblins, that haunt the houses and cemeteries, have now become little demons already nesting in the human heart.