The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (33 page)

In his introduction to
Sunset at Blandings
, P.G. Wodehouse's final, unfinished novel, Adams hails Wodehouse's comic style as ‘
pure word music . . . He is the greatest
musician
of the English language
.' He writes of Wodehouse's ‘
dazzling images and conceits
' and his ‘
pure, creative playfulness
', comparing him to Mozart, Einstein and Louis Armstrong. This is how I feel about Adams. He may have been inspired by big ideas and scientific concepts but he played like Louis Armstrong, bending the lyrics and the melody to express the joy of playing itself. I did not bump into this Douglas Adams at his birthday party. Nor, in retrospect, did I ever meet him in person. He rarely ventured out in public, sending forth a tall man called Douglas Adams to speak on his behalf: this was the Adams I encountered over the years and who passed away in 2001. The Douglas Adams who really mattered to me lived – and lives – in those inimitable cascades of pure word music.

The following morning before starting work, after attending to the needs of my wife and son in the customary manner, I logged on to the Internet and illegally downloaded a torrent containing sixty computer games from the 1980s and the software with which to play them. The vintage game I was searching for –
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
– is available to play legally and for free at douglasadams.com, the BBC website and other locations on the web. But bad habits die hard. I installed the software, loaded the game and was rather startled to discover, there in front of me, the late Douglas Adams, alive and well. There was nothing on the screen save for a few brief sentences and a flashing cursor but as I gradually navigated my way through the opening scenes, I felt the unmistakable thrill of hearing Adams' voice after a long absence – there were whole passages of original material, unfamiliar and impeccable jokes, wonderful strings of textual DNA; the stuff of life itself. It was great to hear from him again.

Interactive Literature, Adams called it, a form of authorship which played to the strengths of the medium for which it was created, allowing the reader to decide the outcome of the story. He was delighted with the new possibilities it offered him and writers like him; equally, he never underestimated the centuries-old power of words on a page, arranged in set, unchanging lines. He was a man who loved Wodehouse, Dickens and Austen. He never lost his faith in the realignment of the synapses that occurs every time we pick up a good book and start reading, find something that interests us or makes us turn to the next page, so much so that when we look up, the world has changed.

This is the abiding miracle of the book. We choose what happens next.

The List of Betterment

(‘Asterisks denote the easiest to get into if you are starting from scratch . . . And if I missed your favourite one out, well excuse me.' Julian Cope,
Krautrocksampler
.)

1. The Master and Margarita
   – Mikhail Bulgakov*
   
2. Middlemarch
   – George Eliot
   
3. Post Office
   – Charles Bukowski
   
4. The Communist Manifesto
   – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
   
5. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
   – Robert Tressell
   
6. The Sea, The Sea
   – Iris Murdoch
   
7. A Confederacy of Dunces
   – John Kennedy Toole
   
8. The Unnamable
   – Samuel Beckett
   
9. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
   – Patrick Hamilton
   
10. Moby-Dick
    – Herman Melville
    
11. Anna Karenina
    – Leo Tolstoy*
    
12. Of Human Bondage
    – W. Somerset Maugham
    
13. Pride and Prejudice
    – Jane Austen
    
14. Catch-22
    – Joseph Heller
    
15. Lord of the Flies
    – William Golding
    
16. Frankenstein
    – Mary Shelley
    
17. The Odyssey
    – Homer
    
18. Crime and Punishment
    – Fyodor Dostoevsky
    
19. The Unfortunates
    – B.S. Johnson
    
20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    – Hunter S. Thompson
    
21. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
    – Carson McCullers
    
22. Vanity Fair
    – William Makepeace Thackeray
    
23. Jane Eyre
    – Charlotte Brontë*
    
24. Everyman
    – Philip Roth
    
25. Absolute Beginners
    – Colin MacInnes*
    
26. One Hundred Years of Solitude
    – Gabriel García Márquez
    
27. Don Quixote
    – Miguel de Cervantes
    
28. Beyond Black
    – Hilary Mantel
    
29. The Diary of a Nobody
    – George and Weedon Grossmith
    
30. The Epic of Gilgamesh
    – Anonymous
    
31. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    – Charles Dickens
    
32. The Aerodrome
    – Rex Warner
    
33. I Capture the Castle
    – Dodie Smith*
    
34. The Leopard
    – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
    
35. Under the Volcano
    – Malcolm Lowry
    
36. Wide Sargasso Sea
    – Jean Rhys
    
37. On the Road
    – Jack Kerouac
    
38. Paradise Lost
    – John Milton
    
39. American Psycho
    – Bret Easton Ellis
    
40. The Dice Man
    – Luke Rhinehart
    
41. The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1
    – Stan Lee, John Buscema, Jack Kirby*
    
42. Krautrocksampler
    – Julian Cope*
    
43. Beloved
    – Toni Morrison*
    
44. Against Nature
    – Joris-Karl Huysmans*
    
45. Atomised
    – Michel Houellebecq*
    
46. The Handmaid's Tale
    – Margaret Atwood
    
47. The Portrait of a Lady
    – Henry James
    
48. Beowulf
    – translated by Seamus Heaney
    
49. War and Peace
    – Leo Tolstoy
    
50. The Code of the Woosters
    – P.G. Wodehouse
    

The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most

Both this and
Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read
were inspired by equivalent appendixes in Henry Miller's
The Books in My Life
. Asterisks denote authors whose work I have read extensively or in full.

My Book About Me
– Dr Seuss*

Winnie-the-Pooh
and
The House at Pooh Corner
– A.A. Milne

The Adventures of Tintin: The Crab with the Golden Claws
– Hergé*

Asterix and the Cauldron
– René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo*

Moominpappa at Sea
– Tove Jansson*

Good Grief, Charlie Brown!
– Charles M. Schulz*

The Eighteenth Emergency
– Betsy Byars

Black Jack
– Leon Garfield

Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius
– Terrance Dicks*

Ludo and the Star Horse
– Mary Stewart

How to be Topp
– Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle*

The People's Almanac
, 1st edition – David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace

Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in the Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot
– Robert Arthur*

The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok
– Monty Python*

The Hobbit
– J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
– Douglas Adams*

The Death of Reginald Perrin
– David Nobbs*

The Return of Sherlock Holmes
– Arthur Conan Doyle*

The Lord of the Rings
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Coming Up for Air
– George Orwell*

The Beatles: the Authorised Biography
– Hunter Davies

From Fringe to Flying Circus
– Roger Wilmut

The Bible
(‘Good News' edition) – various authors

Hamlet
– William Shakespeare*

To Kill a Mockingbird
– Harper Lee

Cult Movies: the Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful
– Danny Peary

On Broadway
– Damon Runyan

Brighton Rock
– Graham Greene*

The Great Gatsby
– F. Scott Fitzgerald*

Absolute Beginners
– Colin MacInnes*

The Annotated Alice
– Lewis Carroll, ed. Martin Gardner

Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story
– Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga

The Complete Plays
– Joe Orton

Stanley Spencer R.A.
– ed. Richard Carline, Andrew Causey, Keith Bell

The End of the Affair
– Graham Greene*

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
– Laurence Sterne

Dialectic of Enlightenment
– Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer

To the Lighthouse
– Virginia Woolf*

New Grub Street
– George Gissing

V for Vendetta
– Alan Moore* and David Lloyd

The Life of the Automobile
– Ilya Ehrenburg

Flaubert's Parrot
– Julian Barnes*

Lyrics 1962–1985
– Bob Dylan

Collected Poems 1909–62
– T.S. Eliot*

Collected Poems
– Philip Larkin*

Bleak House
– Charles Dickens*

The Child in Time
– Ian McEwan*

Pale Fire
– Vladimir Nabokov*

The Diaries of Franz Kafka
– Franz Kafka*

Ulysses
– James Joyce*

In Search of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann's Way
– Marcel Proust

The Divine Comedy
– Dante Alighieri

London Fields
– Martin Amis*

Jude the Obscure
– Thomas Hardy

The Lost Continent
– Bill Bryson*

Work is Hell
– Matt Groening*

A Scanner Darkly
– Philip K. Dick*

Lucky Jim
– Kingsley Amis

Rabbit, Run
– John Updike*

U & I: A True Story
– Nicholson Baker*

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
– Lester Bangs

Madame Bovary
– Gustave Flaubert

London A–Z Street Atlas
– Geographers A–Z Map Company Ltd

Alma Cogan
– Gordon Burn

Uncle Vanya
– Anton Chekhov*

The Secret History
– Donna Tartt

Wuthering Heights
– Emily Brontë

Mon propre rôle
– Serge Gainsbourg

The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939
– John Carey

Fever Pitch
– Nick Hornby*

Trainspotting
– Irvine Welsh*

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
– Roger Lewis

A Biographical Dictionary of Film
, 3rd edition – David Thomson

Writing Home
– Alan Bennett*

How Proust Can Change Your Life
– Alain de Botton

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties
– Ian MacDonald*

Sword of Honour
– Evelyn Waugh*

Why We Got the Sack from the Museum
– David Shrigley*

Anthropology
– Dan Rhodes*

Boring Postcards
– ed. Martin Parr*

The Buildings of England: Surrey
(2nd edition) – Nikolaus Pevsner, Ian Nairn, Bridget Cherry*

The Rings of Saturn
– W.G. Sebald*

The Kingdom by the Sea
– Paul Theroux

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
– J.K. Rowling*

The Bad Beginning
– Lemony Snicket*

The Human Stain
– Philip Roth*

The Future of Nostalgia
– Svetlana Boym

Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories
– Anton Chekhov*

The Complete Peanuts: 1950–1952
– Charles M. Schulz*

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography
– Jimmy McDonough

Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
– Jonathan Coe*

The People's Act of Love
– James Meek

All the Devils are Here
– David Seabrook

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
– H.P. Lovecraft

Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall
– Luke Haines

Howards End
– E.M. Forster*

The Sense of an Ending
– Julian Barnes*

Then We Came to the End
– Joshua Ferris

We Are in a Book!
– Mo Willems*

In addition, though they were published after the period covered by this book, I must mention Stephen Sondheim's
Finishing the Hat
:
Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
and
Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany
– Betterment aside, the two books to have given me the most pleasure in the century so far.

Books I Still Intend to Read

I intend to read these books and also write about them. Please visit mill-i-am.com for updates.

The remainder of
Remembrance of Things Past
– Marcel Proust

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
– Ken Kesey

Infinite Jest
– David Foster Wallace

The Golden Notebook
– Doris Lessing

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
– Michael Chabon

Love in a Cold Climate
– Nancy Mitford

A House for Mr Biswas
– V.S. Naipaul

Naked Lunch
– William Burroughs

The Diary of a Young Girl
– Anne Frank

White Teeth
– Zadie Smith

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
– Dave Eggers

The Summer Book
– Tove Jansson