5 Books I'd Be Happy To Die Whilst Reading

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” 

OK, I didn’t make that up, gonzo journalist and National Lampoon enthusiast, P.J. O'Rourke, said that, but it captures the essence of what I’m trying to persuade you of so, we’ll go with it.

There’s an untapped, largely underpublicised trove of GREAT books out there that fall into the wasteful No Man’s Land between classics from GCSE English Lit.  and slebrity ghost-written biographies. We’ve learnt all we can from Of Mice and Men and there’s little worth in investing the required hours to decipher Katie Price’s various volumes so here are 5 tomes guaranteed to lure you away from Netflix, i player and your adult website of choice, and get you back on the grown-up hobby wagon for good.

1)

My Dearest Jonah

Matthew Crowe

Don’t read up about the author; you’ll find out that he’s several years younger than you, yet has penned, probably, the best book of 2013 and definitely a better book than you’ll ever half-write a few notes for.  

Crowe has turned out a story that writers with decades of experience would proudly call their best and My Dearest Jonah is a return to the kind of craftsmanship we’ve given up on seeing in modern novels and you probably won’t have seen since you last read a ‘classic’.

I bet you a grand that when your own kids get to middle school, provided they weren’t confiscated as wards of the state at birth because you’re a MESS, they’ll be teaching this enigmatic tale of Jonah and Verity, who strike up a mutually life-saving pen-pal relationship just at the point Verity’s life spectacularly implodes and Jonah’s is set to be rebuilt following a lengthy prison sentence.

2)

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson

I love psychopaths, conspiracy theories and bumming around; so does Jon Ronson, and his widely publicised penchant for the former two saw him on the receiving end of a cryptic phone call asking if he’d assist with identifying the mentalist(s) who posted copies of some old book around the world to various highly regarded neurologists.

His investigation takes a predictable turn towards the insane and sees him learning how to apply the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (invaluable knowledge for us all) as he comes across committed psychos in special units as well as the yet-to-be-diagnosed mentalists who somehow manage to claw their way to the top of global conglomerations

While dark, murky and freaky as fuck in some places, Ronson (who also wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats) remains chipper about the sorts of people who, when shown a photo of a frightened face and asked to name the emotion reply: “I don’t know what that emotion is but it’s the face people make before I kill them.” PERFECT Sunday evening come-down reading.

3)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky

OK, so this is, technically, a classic, but in the most acceptable (for our purposes) sense of the word, it’s a ‘Modern Classic’.

MTV started up their own publishing house just so they could get Stephen’s debut novel out into the world (it may not have happened that way round, but it was certainly the first book MTV ever published and they’re the kind of people sorry, were, the kind of people, that would do something as spontaneously mad-cap as conjuring a publishing company out of thin air).

It’s a book with its own soundtrack and the music is as important as the setting, characters and events, all of which will at once plunge you into a deep nostalgic depression and exonerate you of your torturous teenage years.

Think of it as Catcher in the Rye for children of the 80s.

4)

The Etymologicon

Mark Forsyth

Don’t be put off by the wordy (pun intended) title; The Etymologicon is an accessible, readable, funny look at the origin of words and the humorous links between ancient meanings and modern-day language.

The fanatical wordsmith puts to rest some age-old myths, including whether the aptly named Thomas Crapper actually invented the flushing toilet, and where the phrase “enough room to swing a cat” comes from (animal lovers should steer clear of this chapter).

The entire book is littered with gems of wisdom, perfectly clipped into memorable sound-bites, which can be readily shared in order to make you appear knowledgeable and interesting, for example, did you know the light-hearted, multi-purpose greeting “Ciao” actually means, “I am your slave”?

He also chucks a quiz in at the end, and everybody likes a quiz.

5)

The Life of Lee

Lee Evans

Do not scroll down, I haven’t sneakily shoe-horned in a sleb autobiography. Lee Evans is the Dickens of his generation. Honest. Not shitting you.

God knows where the profusely sweaty, O level failing, stage-pacing maniac learnt to write like this, but The Life of Lee is, honestly, a pleasure to peruse.

His Dad tried to name him Cassius Clay, he spent his formative years lugging a prop box round working men’s clubs and amateur boxing, he met his wife when he was about 12 and STILL loves her and never quite manages to connect the dots between the Bristol housing estate he was born onto and the Hollywood films roles and sell-out arena shows he’s gone on to.

 Look past the World Cup cranial silhouette and you’ll see that Lee is a masterful poetic soul of inconceivable measures.

To conclude, you don’t have to sit on the tube with a first edition Voltaire on your lap to lure like-minded quasi-intellectuals; all of these books are meaningfully weighty, affecting and actually interesting.

Ignore all of the above if you’re a Kindle owner; you can continue re-reading your favourite passages from Fifty Shades of Grey and your seat neighbours will be none the wiser.

 

My Dearest Jonah - Matthew Crow

Jonah and Verity strike up a mutually life-saving pen-pal relationship just at the point Verity’s life spectacularly implodes and Jonah’s is set to be rebuilt following a lengthy prison sentence.

Desperate to escape the person he once was, Jonah tried to disappear into a quiet, small-town life, but he finds it as difficult to escape his past as Verity finds it to emerge from hers. They cling to each others letters as the only source of hope and light in the face of increasingly dark forces.

Most of the early chapters were spent muddling through the fog of who exactly our hero and heroine are, how they know each other and why they’re in touch but despite this, the decrepitly glamorous setting, enigmatic snippets of back-story and endearingly sincere exchanges hold your attention from the start.

Crowe has turned out a story that writers with decades of experience would proudly call their best and My Dearest Jonah is a return to the kind of craftsmanship we’ve given up on seeing in modern novels and you probably won’t have seen since you last read a ‘classic’. Crowe’s tightrope balance of visual embellishment without exhaustive description can’t be taught and will certainly see him crowned as one of our greatest modern writers once the national curriculum exam book selection committee get hold of his work.

You’ll surely want to read more from this young writer and, sadly, this is only his second novel, but his debut, Ashes, looks equally dark & captivating.  

Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes - Sue Watson

Stella Weston has worked for years to secure her place as a top television producer and the best mum and wife her career would allow, so when her conniving boss puts her out to pasture in the gardening programming department, Stella’s family-life, along with her career, take a nose-dive when she’s packed off to the country to produce a curious Songs of Praise meets Gardener’s World hybrid.

As Stella’s personal and professional life take hit after hit, she seeks comfort in the only therapy she’s ever known-baking and eating the products of said baking.

There’s a gay best friend, a flamboyant divorcee, a tart married to a vicar, a cheating husband and a draconian power-dressing boss, making Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes more predictably cast than a Grimm’s fairytale.

When you learn that author, Sue Watson, is a real-life TV producer turned author, the lack of ingenuity in her ‘creation’ of TV producer turned professional baker, Stella Watson, I mean, Weston becomes even more disappointing.

Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes is one of those inoffensive reads that should hold the attention of easily-pleased chick-lit fans for a couple of days or so and all those lengthy passages about baking can be skipped over to help you get to the end of this predictable froth as quickly as possible.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window and Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson

It’s Allan Karlsson's 100^th birthday and the mayor, among many other distinguished guests have gathered at the retirement home to wish him well and congratulate his advanced age, but Allan has another plan, and by the time the matronly care nurse comes to collect him from his room, he's already slipped out with just his wallet and indoor slippers. 

Allan makes it to the bus station before anyone notices he is gone and a chance run-in with an unpleasant youth transporting an inestimable suitcase alters the course of his gentle escape plan. Luckily a seasoned, but accommodating, criminal takes Allan under his wing and leads him safely from the encroaching police search party and the owner of the inestimable suitcase.

Despite multiple deaths, close-calls and a nationwide search, a recognisable tedium stunts the flow, and a little more pace when describing an armed robbery or gallant cross-country escape would've been more fit for purpose. The snail's pace might characterise the experiences of our centenarian hero, helping us to understand his very unusual version of a crime-caper, but lengthy descriptive passages combined with the clean, direct writing (which works in some instances) makes for a dry reading experience.

However, when Jonasson skips back several decades and better acquaints us with Allan's impressively colourful past, this chapter of his life seem much less extraordinary and more like the way this gallivanting munitions expert who has not only seen but shaped some of the most important events of the last century SHOULD end his time on earth.  

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World - Simon Callow

2012 marks the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth, a writer who’s work continues to inspire contemporary writers, film and television adaptations, and artists the world over, with Helena Bonham Carter as Ms. Havisham in the latest incarnation of Great Expectations due out in November.

Callow has focused on a lesser-known aspect of Dickens’ creative life, in a bid to offer an alternative to the scores of autobiographies sure to be reissued in this bicentennial year, that of Dickens’ love for the stage.

A child entertainer from a very young age, Dickens wrote, staged and acted in countless theatre productions right up until his death.

His dramatic personality and adoration of the theatrical process shaped how he presented the characters, settings and plots in his darkly, humorous gothic stories.

Dickens loved to see his fans enjoying his work and felt the creative process was completed by presenting his stories first-hand to legions of adoring fans at public readings where he brought those, now iconic, characters to life with his dramatic skill.

Callow, a famously exuberant and flamboyant performer himself, (best known for his role as one half of the May-December gay couple in Four Weddings and a Funeral) explores how Dickens’ own personality, wit, love for performing and lust for attention transferred to the page, making his timeless stories and character spring to life for his readers, even 200 years on.

Desert Island Discs: 70 years of castaways - Sean Magee & Kirsty Young

BBC Radio 4 is often dismissed as stuffy and old-fashioned, holding little relevance in this digital age, but it has been the home of one of the most enduringly relevant radio programmes of all time, Desert Island Discs.

Since the man who devised the programme, Roy Plomley, interviewed the first ever castaway in January 1942, more than 3000 of the day’s most influential, controversial and news-worthy faces have talked through the eight records, one book and single luxury they would take with them to the mythical desert island.

To celebrate 70 years of Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young, sometime Have I Got News For You anchor and presenter of the radio show since 2006, has brought together over 80 of the most memorable guests to grace the airwaves over the past seven decades.

The show has only had four presenters, who have each scored equally impressive coups with their celebrity bookings.

Plomley, who served as presenter for over forty years had the pleasure of Alfred Hitchcock and Margaret Thatcher’s company, as well as the young, now Sir, Cliff Richard, whom he quizzed about his “frenzied” on-stage dancing.

Plomley’s successors, Michael Parkinson and Sue Lawley, saw the likes of Elton John, Tony Blair and HRH Princess Margaret during the 1980s and 1990s, while today’s presenter, Kirsty Young, has lured similarly impressive guests, from Morrissey to Johnny Vegas, the latter of whom gave, surprisingly, one of the most personal and affecting interviews to be captured in the book.  

Sleb - Andrew Holmes

Felix Carter is famous, ‘properly’ famous, he’s the stylish, rough-and-ready, pop sensation every guy wants to be etc. etc.

Chris Sewell, a married, alcoholic, 30-something advertising executive is also famous, but only because he shot Felix Carter dead and is now the nation’s most infamous lifer, courting his adoring public from his prison cell. 

This 2003 publication was presumably re-released last month to cash in on our relentless obsession with celebrity, a phenomenon even author, Andrew Holmes, must have expected to have died down by now, but his satirical hero, Chris, who’s ‘fame’ is of the most questionable kind, is more relatable now than ever.

Sleb is chick-lit for men - an easy-going, readable, first-person caper, with plenty of guy-friendly criminal behaviour, minimal dialogue from fussy-females, vigilante displays of political and social power and frequent references to Star Wars, boozing, laddish behaviour and early Noughtie’s gadgetry. 

Despite this, Holmes - a journalist by trade and hence, well-trained in the art of organising sensationalised titbits into a page-turning news story – has constructed a layered, time-bending, ‘whodunnit’ style plot, even though we know who did it, as he tells us so himself fairly early on, but it’s the why and the how that the author tantalisingly drags out. 

Sleb is gory, messy and brash but even if that’s not your thing, Chris’ complicated motives should hold your interest until the end.