Robert MacFarlane's Underland. We start where we began with nature writing rather than novels. Enhanced by Radiohead's artist in residence Stanley Donwood's excellent covers MacFarlane's books preserve the poetry of natural language and unique sense of place. I don't think writers like Roger Deakin and Richard Mabey really fit into the more trendy concept of psychogeography but they know how to explore the deep meanings of a place - literally with this one.
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman. If there isn't a Norwich City supporter's branch of english literature then I'm happy to start one here. It's diverse admittedly. Delia Smith's no nonsense cookbooks, Stephen Fry's classical and bawdy comedy and Philip Pullman's so called kid's books. Readers of this book might be in for a bit of shock - Lyra has periods and has to fight off attempted rape from a bunch of soldiers. This is not kid's stuff of course. What I like about Philip's books are the fact that they crush age, gender and religious stereotypes. Like the timeless, ageless books of Alan Garner or Susan Cooper (but I'm not sure about what teams they support so can't include them here).
The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. Of course a good read doesn't have to be a novel. In the right hands facts and statistics can be a pleasure to read. It just requires an enquiring mind, an eye for detail and the feeling that you have just parachuted in from an alien planet. That is the secret of good travel writing but the impressive breadth of Bryson's approach works just as well for language, science and that particularly troublesome travel companion The Body.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (no not that David Mitchell - the Shakespearean comic married to Mrs Only Connect). This is an extraordinary novel which weaves 6 separate stories into one novel and subsequent film. There's even a Facebook group called Cloud Atlas Changed My Life. It didn't change mine but I look forward to each new book by David Mitchell because his particular brand of speculative fiction (is there any other kind?) uses the unreliable narrator and shifting multiple personalities to continually disorientate the reader. When it works it provides an exhilarating kaleidoscope of parallel lives, when it doesn't it sucks.
Len Deighton's Berlin Game. Bit of a pot boiler but the Ipcress File and the Game, Set and Match trilogy have a more realistic, cynical and urbane approach to spy shenanigans than the James Bond industry and we haven't come very far from a world in which the American President is quoted mysteriously as saying 'I am a jam doughnut'. This geopolitical trail has taken me to John Le Carre, Robert Harris and more recently the excellent but exhaustive historical podcasts of Dan Carlin.
The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe. Undoubtedly it was the music of Hatfield and the North that led me to the novels of Jonathan Coe but I love the fact that these things become circular and self-referential. Check out Jonathan's Unnessesary Music on Bandcamp which is a pleasant and necessary reminder that people are not defined by the one area of work. Back to the novel - this is just a funny rites of passage for Midlands teenagers who grew up on the cusp of progressive music moving to punk. Jonathan excels in this kind of poignant satire hence the most recent Brexit travails of Middle England.
The Lyre of Orpheus, the concluding book in Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy. No particular back story to this choice; I just enjoyed his cross-cultural interweaving of different arts, personalities and relating them to myths and character archetypes. In this case it is the art patron Arthur Cornish who finds an uncomfortable parallel to King Arthur in his funding of the staging for an unfinished opera by ETA Hoffman. In his obituary the Times wrote, "Davies encompassed all the great elements of life ... His novels combined deep seriousness and psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth." Not sure I'll get away with a trilogy here but all the same I would recommend you start with the Rebel Angels if you were interested in working though to this one.
Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall. Perhaps not his finest book but the most famous and much easier to get hold of than some of his flimsy books of poetry and biographies. Although I didn't study literature at UEA I was lucky enough to do my thesis on Nuttall who was also a performance artist, jazz musician and actor. To this end I conducted a long drunken interview with him in Todmorden wearing pyjamas and sporting bright green hair (me, not him). I was going through a punk phase and very much into anarchic counter-culture. I was there when Malcolm Bradbury's History Man went into TV production (and recognised some of the thinly disguised characters in his satire on modern universities). Unfortunately I never met Kazuo Ishiguro who was studying there at the time with Malcolm and Angela Carter. Ian McEwan and Anne Enright (the latter I'm reading at the moment) had just left and were starting to make a name for themselves.
That Hideous Strength ends CS Lewis' science fiction space trilogy which is a more adult set of books than the later Narnian Chronicles like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe etc. This one is set on Earth in a dystopian post-war setting and explores some of Lewis' Christian analogies and pseudo-astrological mythology. I read the Screwtape Letters, re-read the Narnia books and then the Hobbit quickly followed by the Lord of the Rings as a teenager. I remember completing Tolkein's major opus in a sort of lockdown during a storm on a short course at Warwick University. That was the perfect setting to disappear into fantasy. For those who only know the films they may be surprised by the completeness of the world which Tolkein, Lewis and others create. I enjoyed the battles and chases portrayed in the films but they are enriched by maps, songs, poetry and other weird characters like Tom Bombadil. Competing for this slot were Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea and Christopher Priest's I Dream of Wessex.
My first books were nature books graduating from Ladybird to Observer's pocket series to the mighty Reader's Digest Book of British Birds. But it was Kirkby Library that first gave me the bug to read about people interacting with animals in a factual or fictional context. My Family and Other Animals (including the TV series based on it) gives a flavour of adventure in hot climates with sticky people and beasts. Overloaded Ark, about collecting in West Africa, was the one it started it for Gerald and started it for me. My grandparents took me to his Jersey Zoo as part of a Channel Islands holiday as a child. Writing is how Gerald financed his pioneering conservation work. Never let anyone tell you a zoo is cruel. Individual cages can be (particularly for bigger animals) but it's down to poor design. We all know this feeling now when you can be stuck in a high rise flat with limited open space (or lucky enough to have access to a park or countryside).
