You may have seen the summer reading list that Tory MPs have been issued with. But here’s an alternative set of book recommendations for you, this time from Spectator staff. Not all the books will be newly-published. But they’re generally books that we’ve read – and enjoyed – recently. Hopefully, we’ll unearth a few gems for you. If so, please do return the favour by making your own recommendations in the comments section.
Right, I’ll get the ball rolling with my suggestions…
Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone is up there with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as the best piece of reportage to come out of the Vietnam War. O’Brien – who took part in the conflict as an infantry man – is keenly introspective, and writes openly about toll waged on his psyche by every firefight, every landmine, and every death of a friend. The end result is as lyrical as it is horrifying.
First published in 1935, BUtterfield 8, by John O’Hara, is a sordid tale of Depression-era New York. A girl ends up dead, but why? For O’Hara, a master of social observation, the devil is in the details. Everything – from the way the characters prepare their cocktails, to the clothes they wear – drives the narrative to its ambiguous conclusion.
And, yes, that book on nudging’s worth reading too…
Mark Amory
Charmingly naïve readers sometimes think that the literary editor (me) has read all the books that have been reviewed, not to mention the ones that are coming soon. This is not so. There is one, however, that I read the whole of because it was so beguiling: Bits of Me are Falling Apart by William Leith. Only just a novel, in that it really has only one character and scarcely any plot, it concerns the hell of being 47 and in not very good shape. The Spare Room by Helen Garner, just out, is grimmer yet, another novel that feels close to autobiography. This time there are effectively two characters, one nursing the other through cancer – subtle, profound and I am still not sure whose side I was on. Neither book is depressing.
Matthew d’Ancona
Books on happiness, general well-being and nudging are fine, but books about getting out of an almighty financial mess will be more topical for this generation of Tories. Nigel Lawson’s The View from Number Eleven is still the key text, but Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty is under-rated and full of laconic wisdom. Most Tories still don’t have a clue about wider culture and society, so I would recommend our own Alex James’s Bit of a Blur, now in paperback, a beautifully-written primer on everything that they have missed out on. Fiction: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which is as close to the perfect novel as I can imagine.
Liz Anderson
Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream. A delightful memoir, chronicling Mount’s childhood in Wiltshire, his travels around Europe with his mother, his time at school, Oxford and Downing Street, surrounded by his charmingly eccentric ‘Hobohemian’ family and friends. Altogether a wonderfully witty and elegant recalling of his ‘early life and other mistakes’.
Tom Rob Smith’s first novel Child 44, a thriller set in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, when Stalin’s powerful grip terrorised the nation. Long-listed for the Booker, it’s a real page-turner.
And for a lighter (in lbs) read, try Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, set on an isolated island in the Pacific. A beautifully crafted novel.
Henrietta Bredin
Little Dorrit. Read it before it arrives on our screens in the BBC autumn drama schedule, when I’m sure it will be gripping stuff as scripted by Andrew Davies, although it would be terrific if another writer could get a chance at adapting these big chunky Dickens novels once in a while. It’s as stuffed with juicy characters as currants in a mincepie – Little Dorrit, born in the Marshalsea Prison, where the debtors and credit crunch victims of the day, including Dickens’ own father, were banged up; Arthur Clennam, returned from years in China to a London both drearily familiar and alarmingly strange; Mrs Merdle glittering complacently at the top of the social tree with her parrot ‘watching her with his head on one side, as if he took her for another splendid parrot of a larger species’. Glorious.
James Forsyth
Dead Certain by Robert Draper. This is the best biography of George W. Bush written to date. Reading it, one is left with a sense of how much Bush’s strengths are his weaknesses, and vice-versa.
Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the image of American democracy by Mary Dudziak. A brilliant book on an under-discussed element of the debate over civil rights. Particularly timely at the moment.
Fraser Nelson
Descent into Chaos – recently published, the only book you need read to understand the Afghanistan/Pakistan conflagration which may well provide our next war. One of the best books I’ve read in my life, from a genuine expert who knows the area and its main players. Reads like a thriller.
Greenspan’s Bubbles – how America rumbled Alan Greenspan and understood the bubble. A critique which applies with bells on to Gordon Brown. I’ve recommended it to every Tory likely to be doing battle with Brown or Darling. This short, punchy book contains all you need to understand the credit crunch.
Martin Vander Weyer
Typhoon by Charles Cumming – a gripping tale of spies and terrorists up to no good in China in the run-up to the Olympics.
Mary Wakefield
Moscow Circles is a sad, satirical, funny, fantastical, violent, political, vodka-sodden account of a train journey from Moscow to nearby Pietushki in the early 70s. The author, Benedict Erofeev, wrote it in a fortnight for a bet because he needed the cash for booze. Once you’ve read it, hunt down Pawel Pawlikowski’s heart-breaking documentary, Moscow — Pietushki, based on the book and made just before Erofeev’s inevitable, drink-induced death.
Brothers Karamazov. Ok, it’s a bit obvious, but re-read it! Why not? I did, earlier this week, and now I’m goofing around in a state of dumbstruck awe. Anyone who frets over Britain’s ‘broken society’ must first have an answer to Ivan K’s contention that in a Godless world, ‘everything is permitted’.
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