Finding Oneself through Fiction: My Ten Favourite Novels

From millennia-spanning thrillers to a comedy narrated by a chimp

The word ‘favourite’ in the title of this piece is misleading. Quality was only a small part of the criteria for selection. It is really about which novels were the most life-changing.

In theory, having one’s nose buried in books is a respectable and sensible thing to do. But me being me, even as a school-kid, I managed to turn reading texts assigned by teachers into a form of self-destructive rebelliousness.

Having always dreamed about being an author, I have found reading fiction even more challenging than living in the real world. And often more rewarding. Here are ten of the works of fiction which broke me down and built me up again.

1. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by JRR Tolkien (read in 1998, aged 14)

Having graduated from Roald Dahl, as a pubescent kid my favourite books were from the Point Crime series. Then in the 1997/98 academic year, English teacher Mr Burke assigned teen thriller ‘Stone Cold’ by Robert Swindell and comedy ‘Zak’ by Frances Thomas, both of which I devoured.

But the one book to rule them all for teenage me was JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’. I was inexperienced enough as a reader not to have foreseen certain plot beats, such as Gandalf returning from apparent death, and Frodo Baggins being reunited with his uncle Bilbo.

Standout quote: “Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

I hated being a kid and wanted to experience everything that life had to offer. I’m as much of a daydreamer and outsider now as I was then, and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a lesson in how the arts are the only context in which megalomania is a good thing, and that’s why the creative life is the life for me.

2. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Erich Maria Remarque (read in 2000, aged 16)

As is true for most people, my education was what I got when I wasn’t doing my homework. Having already been blown away by the 1930 film, I read this novel in spring 2000 when I really should have been revising for my GCSEs.

A series of books had recently been published in white hardback called Millennium Classics. Since reading and creativity were the only things I seemed to be good at, I started to dream about following in the footsteps of the greats. Inspired by his own experiences of trench warfare, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is narrated in the first person and in the present tense, and matter-of-factly depicts the life of a German soldier during the Great War, quite possibly the worst life available to a human being.

Standout quote: “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

This quote comes from a memorable scene in which narrator Paul Bäumer is trapped in a fox hole with a French soldier who is slowly dying in front of him. It exemplifies why many of the soldiers felt more camaraderie with the enemy than with their deluded compatriots on the home front. Though I dreamed of becoming an author, I wasn’t too keen on sharing Erich Maria Remarque’s experience of close combat with bayonets.

3. ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ by John Buchan (read in 2001, aged 17)

In John Buchan’s thriller, glamour-starved protagonist Richard Hannay encounters a journalist called Scudder who claims to have uncovered a conspiracy to assassinate a politician that will trigger war in Europe. Hannay shelters him in his flat, and when Scudder is found dead, Hannay is forced to flee from both criminals and cops, all while trying to expose the conspiracy and stop a war.

Standout quote: “A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.”

By this age, I had already finished novels by twentieth century giants Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Joseph Conrad. But this was my first experience of a classic from the canon being unputdownable. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film adaptation is much lighter in tone. It replaces Scudder with an attractive blonde woman, because of course it does.

4. ‘The Fall’ by Albert Camus (read in 2001, aged 17)

By the time I read ‘The Fall’, I had already read Camus’s ‘The Outsider’. The protagonist in the latter does not feel things the way society says he should. What is more appealing to a seventeen year-old than a lyrical exposé of the hypocrisies of our civilisation. ‘The Fall’, the last novel Camus published in his lifetime, skews bourgeois civilisation and even more importantly for seventeen year-old me, was endlessly quotable.

Standout quote: “I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”

The narrator of ‘The Fall’ was once at a high station in society. Everyone liked him, and he liked himself. When he witnesses a suicide that he fails to stop, he begins to recognise the hollowness behind his own acts of generosity. Symbolic of this is the way his old self doffed his cap to blind people. Entering working age, I was coming to the realisation that the world rewarded looking like a good person much more than it rewarded being a good person, and Camus was an author who dared to tell this unpleasant truth.

5. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera (read in 2003, aged 19)

In autumn 2003, I took a module on novel writing. I was excited as I was naïve about what it would take to write good fiction, and since I didn’t understand the difference between surface brilliance and depth of quality, I bought a copy of Milan Kundera’s classic because I was enchanted by the title.

Standout quote: ‘It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying ‘Einmal ist keinmal.’ Teresa was born of the rumbling of a stomach.’

Kundera openly converses with the audience about his thought process when creating these characters. This approach was relatively new to the novel in the late twentieth century, and I was impressed as I was daunted by the prospect of ever being able to write anything half decent.

I didn’t spend much time online in those days, but I remember reading of Kundera in an online essay “he has a first-rate mind.” I had come from two somewhat philistine walks of life – rural, church-going, working-class Northern Ireland and affluent, suburban Cheshire – and I had found myself at university during the height of lad culture. I asked myself what it would take to ever have a first-rate mind?

The people around me bought Nuts and Zoo magazines, watched teen-gross-out movies, and found WKD adverts hilarious. I realised that, like Teresa, my favourite character in the novel, I would have to zone out to my surroundings to become the person I wanted to be.

6. ‘The House of the Spirits’ by Isabel Allende (read in 2006, aged 22)

In 2006, I read on average well over two books a week, as I completed an MA at Sussex University titled Creative Writing & Personal Development. I was in my early twenties and wanted to creatively and intellectually conquer the world, when in reality I could barely get a job interview or a first date.

Standout quote: “My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.”

Here was an author who brought it all together, fact and fiction, heart and head, tragedy and comedy, often infusing the former with the latter. I had recently finished a grotesquely unpleasant summer job in America, and my favourite journalist was John Pilger, and a novel about one of the evils of Anglo-American foreign policy gripped me.

I was acutely aware that whatever paid work I did would involve joining the ranks of the enemy. But this novel shows that art is worth making, truths are worth telling, and ambitions are worth fighting for, even though bittersweet compromises are the ceiling.

7. ‘Red Rose, White Rose’ by Eileen Chang (read in 2011, age 27)

For most of my twenties, the life of a fiction writer seemed an impossibly lofty one. I made a few attempts at starting a novel but needed to spend my days on more prosaic things, like working and paying bills.

The art-form I focused on was the song, because someone as insecure as me can really use seeing audiences react in real time. But I still maintained that the highest of all art-forms was the novel.

At the dear-departed Page One books in Hong Kong, I purchased a copy of Eileen Chang’s novella ‘Red Rose, White Rose’. Set in Shanghai in the 1930s, it is about a love triangle between protagonist Tong Zhenbao, his wife Yanli ("white rose"), and his mistress Jiaorui ("red rose"). The first paragraph alone is pure poetry, and rendered me unable to write fiction for the foreseeable future, because I was conscious of whose footsteps I was following in.

Standout quote: “There were two women in Zhenbao's life, one he called his white rose, the other his red rose. One was a spotless wife, the other a passionate mistress. Isn't that just how the average man describe a chaste widow's devotion to her husband's memory - as spotless, and passionate too? Maybe every man has had two such women - at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.”

8. ‘The Incarnations’ by Susan Barker (read in 2014, aged 30)

Published in 2014, which coincidentally was the time I decided to finally get serious about writing fiction, Susan Barker’s ‘The Incarnations’ is a whodunit that spans a millennium and a half of Chinese history.

Described in The Independent as ‘China’s Midnight’s Children’, ‘The Incarnations’ is unlike ‘Midnight’s Children’ and most Booker Prize-winners in that it is utterly gripping. In 2008, taxi driver Wang Jun starts receiving anonymous letters from someone who knows a frightening amount about his past, his personal life, and claims to have known him over five previous lifetimes.

I started writing a short story collection at this time, and every time I revisited Barker’s novel, I thought: “if this is the standard I have to reach, then just forget it.” I subsequently learned that literary success requires years of bleeding onto the page, but it doesn’t lead to any other form of success, eg wealth or status. So in a sense, the pressure is off.

Standout quote: “The worst days were when the polluted sky threw a cloak of invisibility over the city, obscuring buildings a hundred metres away and darkening Wang’s mood. The pollution seems like a curse to him, the curse of the million-year-old fossils, excavated out of seams deep in the ground and burned as fuel. The spirits of the ancient trees and animals, protested at being dug out of their resting places with lung-blackening particulates that poison the air.”

9. ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov (read in 2014, aged 30)

Monsters are a fascinating subject. One of my favourite short stories is ‘Little Louise Roque’ by Guy de Maupassant, which is told from the viewpoint of a rich, powerful man who murders a schoolgirl. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of ‘Lolita’, is as monstrous as they come, recounting years of abuse of an underage girl while justifying it to himself.

This is what good fiction does. It says fresh, original things about subjects that defy intellectualisation.

Standout quote: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.

10. ‘Spoiled Brats’ by Simon Rich (read in 2014, aged 30)

It is somewhat liberating to have a hero younger than oneself. Simon Rich was regularly being published in The New Yorker throughout his twenties. I discovered his work when he had already published several books and earned a living from writing. Including this book is slightly cheating because it is a short story collection, as opposed to a novel.

‘Spoiled Brats’ includes a short story narrated by a hamster in a classroom, a toy on a child’s shelf, and ‘Family Business’, a story narrated by a chimp. This collection’s masterpiece is ‘Sell Out’, which is narrated by Rich’s own great-grandfather, who has been frozen in time before coming to life in present-day Brooklyn, observing that the men still have beards and the women still look too thin and close to death.

It is often laugh-out-loud funny, and is the definition of ‘light reading’. I was blown away by how Rich writes about such universal subjects so originally, so insightfully, without ever hitting readers over the head with his intellect.

Standout quote (the opening of ‘Family Business’): ‘I love my father, but sometimes he can get on my nerves. It’s hard to explain why exactly. It’s just little things he does, here and there, that bother me. For example, sometimes he shits into his hands and throws the shit into my face while jumping up and down and screaming. I know he’s just trying to be funny – and it is funny, I can see that. But there’s just something about it that annoys me.’

Coming up next: The ten non-fiction books that were life-changing