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.
