I share the sentiments of the others who have already done this. Help. Just five books? Panic. So for want of a better system I’ve just plucked five books that I’m obsessed with; five books that poor, long-suffering friends of mine will have heard me rambling on about at some point or another. There are loads more, of course, but here are five to be getting on with.
The Snow Spider – Jenny Nimmo
Like Emily (Five in Mind part ten), I feel that we should be allowed to ramble about at least one children’s book. I’m not really sure how many other people like The Snow Spider, even though I remember they made a TV adaptation of the third in the trilogy (The Chestnut Soldier). I love this book so much. Like all the best children’s books, one of the most appealing things about it is the magical ‘other’ world it’s about. But what for me makes it so different to lots of other children’s books (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example) is that the reader is never taken to the other world. The main character is shown what it looks like in an enchanted spider’s web at one point, but he never ever actually goes there. I think this is why it was always so powerful for me when I was a child, and why it retained a much stronger resonance than, say, Narnia, or other magic lands in books. It never got spoilt by description.
I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
When I’d just about grown out of the stage where I believed in magical sparkly lands, I was an awkward adolescent and I fell in love with this book. They should give this out as a handbook for teenage girls. I think it’s one of the most romantic books ever written, in every sense of the word, and is probably to blame for many a copy-cat tortured diary (my own included). Who doesn’t want to live in an old ramshackle castle in the middle of nowhere with a Father whose writer’s block is so bad you have to lock him up until he writes ‘the cat sat on the mat’ for days on end, and a glamorously eccentric step-mother who has a penchant for stripping off to nothing but her wellies and wandering around the moors communing with nature? It’s a shame the film had to change the last sentence of the diary. It was perfect as it was.
The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
Then I discovered Angela Carter when I was about seventeen and got really excited, first about The Bloody Chamber, and then about this book and then about everything else published by Virago that I could get my hands on. I have to have this one on my shelf all the time just in case I want to read a bit. It’s kind of grimy and grubby and depressing at the same time as being really beautiful and I remember feeling when I first read it that she said loads of things I felt but would never have managed to formulate in my mind, and struck a chord that other writers I read at the time seemed to be missing.
The Confusions of Young Törless – Robert Musil
I studied this for my degree and it’s one of the ones I’ll keep rereading forever because it’s amazing. It’s all about language, and power, and society, and identity, and the unconscious . . . all the exciting things basically. It also features a character who in my mind is a bit like the homoerotic Austrian cousin of Piggy from Lord of the Flies, so in some ways maybe it’s a sort of sexual Lord of the Flies, but with Freud and Fascism lurking underneath
Hmm, that all sounds like a bit of a mess, doesn’t it. It’s not. It’s great.
The Duino Elegies – Rilke
And finally, my personal bible. You know when someone’s just spent three days at a festival messing around with mind-altering drugs and they come back all weird saying things like “Suddenly I didn’t exist anymore; I didn’t know if I was a man or a woman anymore, or if I was maybe a cat, or a tree, or if I was even alive at all, or if I could even say the word ‘I’ . . .” and all that nonsense?
Well. I swear when I read these for the first time that that exact thing happened to me. I got to about the third Elegy and bang, I honestly wasn’t quite sure if I was alive or dead. The boundaries between everything seemed to have just disintegrated and everything went strange. Granted, I was probably up way past my bedtime and fighting off an impending essay crisis with copious amounts of coffee, but aside from that, I was stimulant free and just high as a kite on Rilke’s beautiful, beautiful images and his strange ideas that seem all the stranger precisely because they seem so familiar – as though they’re something you used to know, but you maybe forgot when you were born.
Ah, Rilke. What a guy.
Anna Kelly
Editorial Assistant, Hamish Hamilton
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