10 Novels For Men

Men don’t buy novels anymore. They’ve pretty much stopped buying magazines and they don’t go to the cinema in as big numbers as they used to. What do they do? The answer is that nobody knows. Advertisers don’t know. TV programmers don’t know. Publishers certainly don’t know. Probably they’re playing Halo online, watching Louis CK videos on YouTube and googling for free pornography, but we can’t be certain.

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In my local Borders they have a "Guy Lit." section which contains thrillers by ex SAS men, alternative histories where the Nazis win the war and Nick Hornby novels...Is there a middle ground between the SS jackboot and the lime green Converse high top? Yes, I think so. Here’s my list of 10 novels for men who don’t normally like to read novels. Each one has the advantage of giving you a passport into a genre or an author that will keep you going for a while.


10. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler. It’s raining in Bay City (Santa Monica) and the slick streets are thick with ironic private eyes - the most poetic and interesting of them is a guy called Philip Marlowe.
9. Use of Weapons - Iain Banks. A crazy, violent space opera set in Banks’s Culture universe. A dude called Zakalwe is a major league bad ass with a power suit and a big gun. Havoc ensues pretty much all the time. At one point he gets his head chopped off by a bunch of insane cannibals. He survives.
8. In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck. Commie agents in 30's California get the living shite knocked out of them as they lay the groundwork for revolution. This is a book to make Glenn Beck keek his whips and cry into his pillow. Nobody reads this anymore. Shame because its awesome.
8. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway. A romantic (but in a manly Hemingwayesque way) American ambulance driver falls in love with war and then a nurse. He falls out of love with the former when he quickly sees how bloody horrible WWI actually is. All the way through you're thinking, this isn't going to end well...Unlike For Whom The Bell Tolls no one gets called "my little rabbit".
7. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse. Zen master Jeeves keeps his upper lip intact even in the most trying of circumstances. You think Snoop Dogg’s laid back? Jeeves would out limbo that mother any day of the week were he so vulgar as to engage in any kind of stick based contest.
6. The Ipcress File - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer is a spy, a gourmand, he counts his coppers, lives in a flat, flies to America and watches an H bomb test (they couldnt afford to put that bit in the movie).
5. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy. It’s basically the Wizard of Oz retold with J Edgar Hoover as the Wicked Witch of the East and with Dorothy blowing her brains out at the end.
4. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen. You know those Irish tourist board ads featuring sandy beaches, jolly times in pubs, pints of Guinness with shamrocks on them? Well Ken Bruen doesn’t write about any of that bollocks. He writes about smart crooks who know that there are many many uses for a good ten pound hammer.
3. Moby Dick - They’ve taken a three year passage on board a leaky nineteenth century whaling ship with a mad captain, dangerous harpoonists and the heavy hand of fate hanging over them. Let’s see the Sea Shepherds try their water hoses on these bad boys.
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Its WW2 through the eyes of Captain Yossarian a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who has become the bombardier on a B17. He has to laugh otherwise he will cry and cry. Ou sont les Snowdens d'antan?
1. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy. Gun battles and horrific slaughter in the old west and Mexico. You'll try and get the wedding party massacre out of your head for the rest of your life. You wont succeed. McCarthy’s masterpiece.

Literary Necrophilia

(This is an old post that I thought I'd dig up with the news that filming has finally begun today(!) on Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit.)

If you are a literature groupie you might enjoy this list. It's my top 10 places - obviously highly subjective - where you can soak up the atmosphere of a particular writer or a certain milieu. Rather conventionally I'm giving you my list in reverse order and keen observers may note that there's actually 15 discrete locations but then math was never my strong suit.


10. The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, England. The bar where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to go to read out loud their works in progress and get criticism and advice from their peers. Large chunks of The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books were composed here. They serve real ale and Philip Pullman and even Alan Moore have been known to pop in. Consequently it's a kind of a nerd paradise and it's where I met that lucky lass the future mother of my children.


9. Dostoyevsky's House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Ok the whole thing's fake, the furniture isn't period and no one knows exactly what his apartment really looked like, but it is as close as we're going to get to the real McCoyski. When I was there they had a free walking tour map where you could follow Raskolnikov and other characters' routes through the city and that's a great thing to do as long as you don't kill an old lady at the end of it.


8. The Site of Pushkin's Duel in the Woods, The St Petersburg Suburbs, Russia
Since we're in Petersburg we might as well stay here. Pushkin wrote a poem about a young man who threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. Rather tragically he then, er, threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. There's a statue marking the spot which was hard to find but worth it: when I went to see it there was a beautiful blonde girl in a white dress leaving flowers for Pushkin and weeping for him as if she'd just heard the news. No, unfortunately, she wasn't the good kind of crazy.


7. The Colburn Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and William Burroughs used to go to Ginsberg's room in the Colburn to take acid, mescaline and other pharmaceuticals and watch the sun set setting behind the Front Range Mountains. I've never enhanced my experience in such a way but the sun sets are nice.


6. Les Deux Magots, St. Germain, Paris
This cafe was the centre of the literary universe for periods in the twenties and again in the fifties. Who mooched cafe au laits and wrote here? Who didn't? Its patrons included: Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett and many others. I mean ok so it's an expensive tourist trap these days but you still have to go here once in your life if only to experience the rudest wait staff in the Western World.


5. The British Museum Round Reading Room, Bloomsbury, London
This is where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital and where anybody who was anybody in British letters did their research and writing. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Auden, Orwell, Waugh, Maugham, Amis etc. all used the RRR at some point. Now that the British library has moved to St Pancras anyone is allowed in to visit the RRR and if you go there early before the hordes of screaming children it can be quite pleasant.


4. The Piano Bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, Havana, Cuba
This atmospheric joint is where Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Be warned the current pianist has an inexplicable fondness for Celine Dion.


3. The Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris
The Ritz Hotel was "liberated" by Ernest Hemingway and a few American infantrymen in August 1944. A massive drinking session ensued. Sergeant JD Salinger showed up and Hemingway bought him a few cocktails having been impressed by his early short stories. Oh if those old whisky bottles could talk...


2. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
Final resting place for Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau and a short hike from Walden Pond State Park where you can visit a reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin. There are many great literary cemeteries in the world (Westminster Abbey and Highgate in London; Montmartre, Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise in Paris; the lovely Novodevichy Convent & Cemetery in Moscow) but this is a very special place. For me it's the epitomy of tranquil, quiet, autumnal loveliness and I wouldn't mind spending all eternity here myself (but not for a while yet).

1 (tied) Garcia Lorca's House, Granada, Spain
After the somewhat dull symmetries and broken fountains of the Alhambra why not walk down the hill to the home of Spain's greatest twentieth century poet. You won't be disappointed.


1 (tied) Dashiell Hammett's Apartment, Post Street, San Francisco
When I visited there was someone actually living here but he was kind enough to let me in anyway. Since this is also technically Sam Spade's apartment too it can be a big thrill for fans of The Maltese Falcon.


1 (tied) Robert Louis Stevenson's House, Apia, Samoa
I haven't actually been here but it's very high on my to do list. Mark Twain visited and was impressed and if I remember correctly Paul Theroux dropped by too. Anyway it looks charming and I'd like to go.

1 (tied) Trotksy's House & Frida Kahlo's House
Ok neither of them are really writers (though Trot had a nice turn of phrase) but these houses are definitely worth a visit. They're very close to one another in the pretty Coyacan section of Mexico City which was actually a port in the time of stout Cortez. (Mind boggling). Trotsky's house was and is like a fortress and he's buried in the front garden. Frida Kahlo's home is one of the most beautiful interior spaces I've ever been in. She turned the house into a full blown extension of her personality and her art blossoms in every corner.


1 (tied) Ernest Hemingway's House, Havana, Cuba
It's quite the scene. If you want to read about my odd adventure in the Finca Vigia then click this link to The Times.

Hope you liked my little trawl through the literary necropoli. Let's do this again sometime, I've got a great story about how I tried to beat Dylan Thomas's record in The White Horse Tavern...

Werner Herzog's Reading List

Werner Herzog's unorthodox film school, The Rogue Film School has 12 rules or guidelines. The first one should be "Do Not Talk About Fight Club" because really that's what he's setting up, either that or a cult, not a film school, however the last five are not only pretty amusing but they also contain Herzog's reading list:

8.Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

9.Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

10.Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list. Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

11.Required film viewing list: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, dir. John Huston), Viva Zapata (1952, dir. Elia Kazan), The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo), the Apu trilogy (1955-1959, dir. Satyajit Ray), and, if available, “Where is the Friend’s Home?” (1987, dir. Abbas Kiarostami).

12.Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.
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Something struck me about the list of the books mentioned in #10. I couldn't figure it out for a while but then it came to me: The Conquest of New Spain, Hemingway's Short Stories, Virgil's Georgics and The Icelandic Eddas were the books that Michael Forsythe was reading in my novel Dead I Well May Be. Does this mean that Werner and I are on some kind of wavelength or are these merely the books that you read before you turn you into a borderline sociopath? Perhaps these are the texts that all young men should read and then subsequently grow out of. I'm not sure. But they certainly are all of a piece. I'd add Christopher Logue's War Music and maybe Kinsella's translation of the Tain Bo Cuailnge.
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Incidentally, if I were forming a cult like Werner Herzog (and I'm ruling nothing out at this stage) I'd only have one book on my reading list and that would be The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. I'd have my acolytes cultivate disenchantment and pessimism not ecstatic truth and Aristotlean virtue. I'd probably get a lot of goths.

Some Tidbits From The Paris Review Interviews

I recently got The Paris Review Interviews III to go with I and II. I think this one might be my favourite of them all. Instead of reviewing the books however I thought I would just give you 10 interesting tidbits from the interviews:

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1. Salman Rushdie is a Lord of the Rings geek and speaks fluent Elvish. That, my friends, is clearly how to impress the ladies.

2. Norman Mailer believed in reincarnation.

3. Jean Rhys lived in terror of obeah - West Indian black magic.

4. Simenon wrote a new Maigret novel every 11 days.

5. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up.

6. James Thurber had a photographic memory and could transcribe entire conversations, perfectly, decades later.

7. Until 100 Years of Solitude came out none of Garcia Marquez's books had ever sold more than 700 copies. (There's hope for all of us!)

8. Martin Amis appeared as a child actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica.

9. Stephen King was drunk during the writing of Cujo.

10. Isaac Bashevis Singer felt that we were surrounded by ghosts and spirits.

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My favourite interviews were with Singer, Faulkner, Denison and Hemingway who all seem pretty likeable. My least favourite were with Graham Greene and William Gaddis who, frankly, seem like jerks.

The Kvetcher in the Rye

JD Salinger surfaced yesterday to stop the release of a novel in Britain and the US which the publishers call "a sequel to Catcher in the Rye." Salinger's lawyers call the book a "rip off pure and simple" and although the publishers are trying to say that the work is more of an homage than a rip off, it looks to me like the book is in violation of every copyright convention out there as it uses characters and situations from Catcher. The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name and very few novelists choose Scandinavia as a good tax haven. The BBC has a bit more on the story here, but what's interesting to me is the fact that JDS is still alive, kicking and angry up in his somewhat isolated (though I drove past it once) home in Vermont. He hasn't published a novel for 57 years and many people wonder what he's been doing all this time. There are two schools of thought. The first is that rather like Harper Lee, he knew he couldn't top himself after Catcher in the Rye so he hasn't written anything. And it is true that he meditates a lot and watches a fair bit of daytime TV. But I prefer the second theory. In her memoir Dream Catcher, JD's daughter Margaret says that Salinger would write every single morning and occasionally he would show her manuscripts of completed novels. Supposedly these manuscripts are in a bank vault in Cornish, Vermont to be published after Salinger's death. Since Catcher is one of the funniest novels I've ever read I'm intrigued and excited by this possibility though of course I do wish Mr Salinger, who is 90 years old, a good few years yet. Tomorrow, incidentally, is D Day and Salinger is a D Day veteran. A platoon sergeant who fought with his troops throughout the Normandy campaign, he took part in the capture of Paris and had a drink with Ernest Hemingway (who had read some of his short stories) in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel; I really hope, in a bank vault somewhere, there's a piece JD's written about that.