James Marriott’s essential reading list, from Proust to Sally Rooney. (Pinched from the Saturday Times!)
I’ll try to tick off as many as I can (but I may skip the poetry and I may take a long time!).
| Book | Author | James Marriott’s description | |
| 1 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | Arguably the most absorbing novel on this list of absorbing novels. Franzen’s family saga is really decently readable. A book you can vanish inside. I think I might reread it later this year. |
| 2 | The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | Critics were a bit sniffy about Tom Wolfe’s sprawling novel about New York society in the Eighties when it was first published. Time has vindicated it. The Bonfire of the Vanities transfixed me when I first read it in my teens. I returned to it a couple of years ago and it had the same effect. |
| 3 | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | Nobody I have given this book to has failed to thrill to it. Middle-class Nicholas Guest (a clue to the plot is in his name) is staying in the family home of the wealthy Tory MP Gerald, whose son he is in love with. Increasingly, Nick is drawn into this glamorous Tory world. Disasters and gay sex ensue. Hollinghurst is arguably our greatest living prose stylist. |
| 4 | Breathing Lessons | Anne Tyler | This novel takes place in the space of a day. Maggie and her husband, Ira, are driving to the funeral of an old friend. Over the course of the journey their minds flit back across their lives and disappointments. Other Anne Tyler novels I’ve read have irritated me with the slight mood of tweeness. This one is melancholy, funny and perfectly judged. |
| 5 | The Past | Tessa Hadley | I love Tessa Hadley. She is a great descriptive writer, a great writer about human psychology and a great observer of human relationships. In a just world, her mantelpiece would be groaning under Booker prizes. Unfortunately, her subject matter is deemed too unfashionably middle class. |
| 6 | In Gratitude | Jenny Diski | Everyone I have lent this memoir to has loved it. As a teenager, Jenny Diski was adopted by – of all people – the chaotic Nobel-prizewinning novelist Doris Lessing. You could read this gripping and insightful memoir in a day. |
| 7 | Through the Narrow Gate | Karen Armstrong | Another memoir. Karen Armstrong is now famous as a writer on the history of religions. As a teenager in the early Sixties she persuaded her parents to allow her to become a nun. Her experience of living in a monastic community is gripping. There is a scene near the end where Armstrong’s order sends her to university. She turns up and discovers that, while she has been locked away in her monastery, the Sixties has happened. |
| 8 | The Lying Life of Adults | Elena Ferrante | Everyone loves Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. This later novel is just as good. Teenage Giovanna (living in Naples, of course) is intrigued by the mysterious aunt her family never talk about and goes in search of her. Ferrante is a genius. |
| 9 | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | This novel about an American missionary family who go to the Congo to spread religion in the Fifties was one of the books that helped me to get over the early-teens reading slump. It takes a bit of work to get into, but it pays off. |
| 10 | The Weirdest People in the World | Joseph Henrich | This book changed the way many people see the world. Joseph Henrich argues that although we tend to view western culture as “normal”, a kind of human default, it is radically different from every other culture in history. Countries such as Britain and the US are Weird (wealthy, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic). Our Weirdness shapes our families, societies and politics. You will never look at society the same way again. |
| 11 | SPQR | Mary Beard | I love Mary Beard’s descriptions of what a grim, squalid and downright ordinary place Rome could be. A book to change your perspective on the past. |
| 12 | The Righteous Mind | Jonathan Haidt | People kept telling me I would love The Righteous Mind (a friend described it as “Marriott coded”). I finally read it a couple of years ago and they were right. It is probably the most convincing description of where our moral convictions come from – what makes us outraged, what makes us disgusted, what makes us feel righteous. None of it is remotely logical. |
| 13 | Amusing Ourselves to Death | Neil Postman | Neil Postman’s blistering polemic against the dawning screen age is the most prophetic non-fiction book of the latter half of the 20th century. Most polemics age badly. This one has only become more relevant with time. |
| 14 | What Good Are the Arts? | John Carey | In What Good Are the Arts? to my hero, the critic John Carey, tries to work out whether the arts are good for anything. The book ends with a gloriously biased (Carey was an English literature professor) defence of literature as the best and most democratic of all art forms. Nobody has made the case for reading better than this. |
| 15 | Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Joan Didion | Was any writer cooler than Joan Didion? Her first essay collection contains some of the most dazzling journalism – and indeed, dazzling writing – of the whole 20th century. Her description of the madness of Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties is unforgettable. |
| 16 | The Sleeping Beauties | Suzanne O’Sullivan | The doctor Suzanne O’Sullivan is famous for probing the mysterious interactions of the body and the mind. This study of mass hysteria opens with a mysterious epidemic of “sleeping sickness” among immigrant children and goes on to explain the extraordinary influence our thoughts and emotions have over our bodies. Revelatory. |
| 17 | In Pursuit of Civility | Keith Thomas | Keith Thomas is probably my favourite historian. He approaches the past like an anthropologist. A book about manners in the 18th century might sound obscure, but this is the best guide I have read to the weirdness of the past. It is full of fascinating details. Laughter was considered impolite (a kind of constrained smile was considered more appropriate) and relieving oneself at the fireplace was felt to be a reasonable thing to do. |
| 18 | Ariel | Sylvia Plath | A really good poet is one who persuades you that poetry could be something completely different from what you thought it was. This is what Sylvia Plath did for me. In my teens I found her poetry off-puttingly overblown and hysterical. I will always remember the day her poetry clicked for me. It reordered my whole sense of what language can do and what poetry can be. |
| 19 | The Blind Watchmaker | Richard Dawkins | I could have put any number of Richard Dawkins books on this list. For my money, he is the greatest science writer of modern times. Possibly ever. I wish every discipline could explain it to us. |
| 20 | Reality Is Not What It Seems | Carlo Rovelli | Speaking of Richard Dawkins… Carlo Rovelli is the closest you can get to a Dawkins of physics. Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who writes intensely readable, popular books that make you feel (at least for five minutes) that you have some clue what quantum mechanics is all about. I went around annoying my friends for about a week saying things like, “Did you know space is a particle?” |
| 21 | The Years | Annie Ernaux | The idea of a “collective memoir” by a fashionable French writer may not sound tempting, but this is a wonderful and readable book. It deserves its fame. Annie Ernaux intertwines the story of her life with the social history of postwar France. She makes you see (as few writers are able to) how much we are shaped not by our own actions but by the societies and times in which we live. It changed the way I think about my life. Very wise and very readable. |
| 22 | The Mating Mind | Geoffrey Miller | We tend to assume that our fabulously complex human intelligence evolved to help us solve problems and therefore to survive more effectively. In this dazzling and provocative book, Geoffrey Miller examines the role of sexual selection in driving the evolution of the human mind. |
| 23 | Worldly Goods | Lisa Jardine | I have a strangely vivid memory of reading this book on holiday in France when I was in my mid-teens. I couldn’t believe how enjoyable I was finding it. In hindsight, I can see that the history books I thought I should like – the ones about battles, diplomatic treaties and who was king when – were never my thing. This book permanently changed the way I look at the past. |
| 24 | The Better Angels of Our Nature | Steven Pinker | This book is a triumphant, trumping counterblast to the default pessimism many people fall into nowadays. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker rakes through hundreds of years of data to show that human society is becoming safer, less violent and more rational. |
| 25 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | I have a friend who says he plans to reread Anna Karenina once every decade until he dies. I reread it myself a couple of weeks ago and I think he is onto something. It is also completely enjoyable to read – not something that is true of every 19th-century Russian classic. |
| 26 | Emma | Jane Austen | For a long time I used to say this was my favourite novel. I have now decided it is silly to pick just one. But Emma is certainly Jane Austen’s best novel. It is the most complex, the most subtle and the funniest. |
| 27 | Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy | Thomas Hardy | Dylan Thomas once said you could open the vast Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy on any page and find something worthwhile to read. I think he’s right. Hardy is the poet who can most reliably move me to tears. If you are new to his poetry, don’t be put off by his apparent clumsiness. You have to trust that he is a genius. If you do buy a copy of his Collected Poems, try one of these: Under the Waterfall, Beeny Cliff, The Voice, God-Forgotten, The Darkling Thrush, God’s Funeral. |
| 28 | The Collected Stories | Katherine Mansfield | One of my dad’s party tricks was reciting passages of Katherine Mansfield’s short story At the Bay by heart while driving us to school. This could have been annoying. It gave me a lifelong love of her writing. |
| 29 | All Our Yesterdays | Natalia Ginzburg | Natalia Ginzburg’s novel received a boost a couple of years ago when the author Sally Rooney recommended it. Rooney knows what she’s talking about. All Our Yesterdays is set in a small town in northern Italy during the Second World War. Sixteen-year-old Anna’s life changes when she falls pregnant after a brief romance. In the background, war and politics are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. |
| 30 | Pnin | Vladimir Nabokov | Vladimir Nabokov is most famous for Lolita. I almost prefer Pnin, which was published two years later. This very short, very comic novel about a hapless emigré Russian professor stranded in America is probably the classic novel I reread most often. It is so witty and tender. And descriptive writing in English has never been brought to a greater perfection. Look out for the shudder-inducing but weirdly gorgeous description of what it is like having your teeth pulled out at the dentist. |
| 31 | What Maisie Knew | Henry James | Henry James, with his twisty, drifting sentences, is never a straightforward read. But this novel about a young girl whose selfish parents divorce and remarry might be the best description of childhood ever written. |
| 32 | Normal People | Sally Rooney | Sally Rooney’s second novel bowled me over when I first read it. Rooney has her detractors (an inevitable consequence of immense popularity) and I haven’t loved all her books, but I still think she is the real thing. |
| 33 | Love’s Executioner | Irvin Yalom | Not all books about therapy are sensible or wise. This one, however, by the psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, is brilliantly insightful about people and life. He is hilariously and fascinatingly unsparing about his clients. Unlike many books by therapists, you feel that Yalom has the skill of really understanding and seeing through people, rather than the skill of spewing fashionable jargon about them. |
| 34 | Swann’s Way | Marcel Proust | Marcel Proust doesn’t deserve his forbidding reputation. Yes, In Search of Lost Time is very long, but this gossipy, profound book is not boring. Small chunks of it can be read as standalone novels or novellas. A good place to start is Swann in Love. The wealthy Swann’s affair with the courtesan Odette is one of the greatest fictional romances of all time. |
| 35 | A Life of My Own | Claire Tomalin | Claire Tomalin’s biographies of Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy are among my favourite books. But don’t miss her memoir. In it she looks back on a life of success and family grief. It ends with the reflection that the older she gets, the more she sees her life as part of a generational story. She puts it so well it is hard to stop seeing your own life in the same light. |
| 36 | Nothing to be Frightened Of | Julian Barnes | Ever since childhood, the novelist Julian Barnes has been terrified of death. This is his memoir of that fear. It is a deep book, but, it also much more entertaining than a book about death has any right to be. |
Table created by taking a photo of the magazine pages and giving them to ChatGPT to extract into an Excel file and then a copy/paste into WordPress.
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