Comfort books (Top 10 Books)

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Product:	Top 10 Books
Date:	18/09/01 (55 review reads)
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Compiling a top 10 book chart is a bit like chosing between the Beatles or the Stones - easy with your mates down the pub, much tougher in front of a blank and hungry screen. But saying that it's a bit of fun so who cares.

So here it is - my top 10 faves. It's not exhaustive because there are books I mean to read but never seem to get the time (story of my life) - Iain Banks and Pratchett's Discworld capers for instance. Anyway...

10) Voyage To Arcturus - David Lindsay.

A badly written surrealist fantasy with real power to cause clinical depression (definitely the Beatles) in readers.
The hero Maskull travels by space ship to Tormance, a world orbiting the planet of Arcturus to find the mysterious drummer Sutur. He meets a procession of bizarre characters and grows new limbs and senses to survive in his strange new world.
At the end of the novel he climbs a tower becoming more exhausted as he nears the top. It actually becomes harder to turn the pages of the book (yeah, I know I'll get my anorak but try it and see for yourself).
Lindsay slaved away in boring insurance for 20 years. He published in 1920 but it bombed, selling less than 600 copies. He gave up after 1932 and died penniless in 1945, poisoned by a rotting tooth he refused to have treated. So it goes.
Word of Arcturus' strange 'ghostly' power spread and it was reissued in 1946. It has influenced every major sci fi writer of the late 20th century.
It can be read for free at www.litrix.com/arcturus/arctu001.htm - but it's difficult to get into and it ain't nice if you do!

9)Lonely Planet's Australia Survival Guide by Mark Lightbody.

Whenever the crap British weather and interminable winters get too much to bear, this is the book I reach for. I spent a year in Australia 10 years ago and had the time of my life using this book.
From a failed love affair in Sydney (not something I found in the book!)
to Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road with a gang of boozy Geordies, to the Red Centre desert, Darwin, Brisbane and the strange world of the barrier reef, Lonely Planet book was my trusty companion.
It keeps alive those memories of a time when I was single and the only worry I had was finding the money for the next beer, sigh.
Lonely Planet is the most effective of all the guide books with sections on getting there and away, places to stay and eat, things to do and a brief country and location history.
It was started by Tony Wheeler and wife Maureen in a backstreet Indian hotel and has grown into hundreds of titles.
The only complaint? Two actually - it's right on about saving the planet and respect for local traditions, etc (which seems to go arm in arm with bashing the Poms) and every backpacker uses it, so getting off the beaten track is a non-starter.

8)A Rebours by JK Husymans

Enjoyable froth written by a French civil servant in need of a life. A Rebours (Against Nature) was hailed as essential reading by Oscar Wilde at his trial for buggery and he based his main character in The Picture of Dorian Gray on its anti-hero Duc Jean Des Esseintes.
The duke is a French aristocrat whose sole mission in life is to sate his jaded palate with new sensations. He would have been smoking Es if he was a rave kid. There is no plot, just Des Esseintes' bizarre lifestyle.
Fave scene - he books a trip to London but spends so much time thinking about what he'll see there he cancels because he feels he had already been.
Next best - a dinner party to mourn the loss of his sex drive where everything must be black, from the food to the fountain (he uses black ink) and the waiters. His jewel-encrusted tortoise is painted black.
JK Husymans was a realist writer who plunged into fin de siecle decadence. He published in 1884 before a flirtation with satanism (all the rage, you know) and a return to Catholicism. He died at pea
ce with the world in 1907. Amen to that at least.

7)Twentieth Century Ornament by Jonathan M Woodham.

The 20th century was a golden era for design in fields as varied as architecture, posters, furniture design, textiles, and ceramics.
But it's a closed shop to most people. Woodham's book alters this by tracing changes in taste step by step and decade by decade, illustrated with 200 colour illustrations plus 200 black and whites.
Want to know the connection between the Bauhaus movement and clothing worn by hippies at the Isle of Wight pop festival? Or Salvador Dali's Mae West lips sofa and a swatch? Or Coca Cola's logo and Soviet propaganda? This book is for you.
Woodham, a member of the Journal of Design History editorial council, has a free and easy writing style too. A unique book for scholars and the coffee table which makes you take notice of the world around you.

6)Post-War Britain: A Political History by Alan Sked and Chris Cook

A speedy romp through the tumultous post war era which prizes clarity above dry and dusty statistics - more Sun than Telegraph.
From Attlee to Major it is witty and revealing - for instance it points out some of Maggie's greatest achievements (Hong Kong, Anglo-Irish agreement) were in the sphere she despised the most - foreign relations. Never thought about that one.
The only downside is the book it changes from history to political propaganda as it nears our own time. Sked is a leading anti-European and it shows as he savages Major's government for trying to engage with Europe.
Sked has since formed a political fringe party and disappeared up his own backside. His book remains a classic.

5)The Origins Of The Second World War by AJP Taylor

'A historian must not hesitate even if his work gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the Queen.'

The Origins of The Second World War sparked a storm of controversy when it was
published in 1961. It took the view, uniquely at the time, that Hitler was not solely to blame for the world war.
The Fuhrer was guilty of unspeakable crimes but he played the same political game as Chamberlain and other leading politicians of the time, a chancer who didn't intend war but became boxed in by events.
Taylor, Britain's leading historian, faced serious charges of doing down his country and anti-semitism. He responded with a withering attack on his critics in the preface to the second edition of the book.
It was the historian's job to find the truth, he said, and he pointed to his meticulous research in to the politics and diplomacy in the 1930s. Prove it, he challenged critics. His free and easy writing style reinforced his case.
Today Origins feels a bit cobwebbed because Taylor saw the world with Victorian eyes and did not recognise Hitler as an entirely new phenenomena - a dictator with industrial might and perverted theories; only Stalin comes close (although Pol Pot has a good go).
Taylor was also hindered by lack of access to Russian archives under communism. But it was a brave book to write at the time and has become a fascinating piece of history itself.

4)The Wasteland by TS Elliott.

Can we have poetry in a list of favourite books? Why not, particularly when it's Elliott's The Wasteland.
A level students groan at the mere title - long, largely written in free verse (no regular rhythms), with obscure meanings and few rhymes. But it handsomely repays re-reading.
Elliott was an American who became a naturalised British subject (all the best Americans do, apart from Madonna, Ruby Wax and that bloke who peers through keyholes).
He wrote The Wasteland in 1922 and it quickly became a key document of modernism, a reaction against the horrors of the First World War as well as to Freud's ground-breaking Interpretations of Dreams (1902).
In the poem Elliott tried to reconnect
with the certainties of the past using a language of the future. He uses bits of Shakespeare, the Bible, Dante, Chaucer and anyone else he can rob to cobble together meaning in a spiritually bankrupt machine age.
He failed - the poem was (and is) too difficult for everyday use, like Joyce's gobbledygook novel Finnegans Wake. I like that word so much I'm going to use it again - gobbledygook.
But it's a brave attempt at the impossible and it has a great ending - 'Shantih, shantih, shantih' (true peace in Sanskrit- it's the Beatles again) Elliott's disappointment with modernism turned him to fascism in the 1930s. Prat.

(Bloody hell this op is long. I'll speed up (no, that's not a book title).

3) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit by Martin Wiener.

Another history book (no groans please) but a key document in the historical research. How comes the British empire, the greatest in history, fell apart at the seams so suddenly? This book has the answers.
In 1832 the British middle classes, made rich by the industrial revolution, tacitly agreed to share political power with the aristocracy under the Great Reform Act. In France they chopped their heads off, in Britain they became like them.
The go-getting spirit of Watt and Stephenson turned to ashes. Manufacturing became a dirty word (still is). Latin was preferred to engineering, Prince Charles and his crackpot theories on architecture to Richard Rogers. The ideal was a house in the country and a title, not a northern factory creating wealth.
This book is the best argument for a republic around.

2) Macbeth by... now what was his name.

A cheesy choice but you've got to have Shaky somewhere and this to my mind is his tragic masterpiece (King Lear is too wordy).
The Bard wrote his Scottish play while seemingly going through a bad patch in his life - perhaps he was just getting old although some sc
holars thinks he had been chucked by his lover the Earl of Southampton - and he throws his anger into the poetry.
Macbeth is a meditation on loyalty, revenge and the deadly nature of evil - topical in a world of Osama Bin Ladens.
Trusted Scottish nobleman Macbeth murders his king and takes his throne on the advice of three old hags and spurred on by his ballsy and ambitious wife. His paranoia and shame overwhelm him (the witches have warned him he will fall) and he descends into madness - Osama watch out.
There are some great lines -
McB: 'But what if we fail?'
Mrs McB: 'Then we fail but if you raise your courage to the sticking point we shall not fail.' -
plus a rollicking good plot with plenty of action, magic and a battle. A 17th century Hollywood epic in glorious Technicolor.

1)Lord Of The Rings

Frequently at the top of 'best book of the 20th century' polls, it's another cheesy choice. But this three-part epic is a staggering achievement by one man.
JRR Tolkein was a big fan of Voyage To Arcturus but his major work is a realist fantasy rather than a surrealist quest.
Written as letters to his son during the Second World War (aah), The Lord Of The Rings is rooted in a world of knights, elfs, dwarves, hobbits, wizards, men and demons. But Tolkein invented detailed history, myths, languages, customs, etc to make Middle Earth real.
As a university literature professor with a love of anglo-saxon literature, he also draws heavily on its traditions of chivalry for inspiration.
The book picks up where his children's book The Hobbit leaves off. An evil ring is found which belongs to The Dark Lord. If he retrieves it he will become stronger and rule the world forever. Nine companions are chosen to take the ring to Mount Doom to destroy it by fire. They face daunting odds on the trip.
There are many scenes to bring a lump to your throat (the death of Theodred is one) and the boo
k has sparked a cottage industry of LOTRs' research, maps and pictures.
Britain was locked in a life or death struggle when Tolkein was writing and critics say it reflects the war - adversity to triumph and a changed world. Could be nonsense but it's tempting.

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