books that demand to be read

We've all been asked countless times by friends and random somebodies what our favourite books might be. Every social networking site or blog inevitably includes 'favourite books' as a profile box to fill, and it's probably the only box I feel comfortable with filling. But for some reason, I can never seem to sum it up at that very moment when I need to be definitive. I always miss the most incredible books out of my pick, or get a heavy dose of brain fog when called upon to utter my favourite authors. So to that end, I thought I'd sit down and actually work out what books I really do care about. The books that, for me at least, demand to be read:




"Slaughterhouse Five" - Kurt Vonnegut
Anything that calls itself an 'anti-war science fiction novel' has my vote. It's like "Catch 22" and "Heart of Darkness" on mescaline, thrust into a malfunctioning time machine and oscillating unpredictably between demented suburban absurdity and the shellshocked accounting of devastation.

"A Clockwork Orange" - Anthony Burgess
Anyone who thinks that Stanley Kubrick's flim adaptation of this novel is a masterpiece just makes me weep with disappointment. Burgess' 'Clockwork Orange' is where it's at -- not just because it gives you the freedom to imagine a much darker dystopia, and the lingo is so much more pervasive that you're basically thrust into learning a new way of speaking by the end of the book, but -- and this is the clinch -- unlike the film, you're actually struggling throughout the novel with your moral identification with Alex. While Kubrick casts Alex as an out-and-out arsehole with very little relent (the film pretty much revels in his loutishness and criminality with nary a character development in sight), Burgess on the other hand manages to get you to a point in reading his novel where you actually find yourself struggling to NOT feel sorry for Alex, despite his criminality and extreme character flaws. It messes with one's head far more than Kubrick's film ever did.

"Disgrace" - J.M. Coetzee
I saw the film adaptation for this recently, after having originally read the novel in 2006. John Malkovich in the role surprisingly brought the story to life for me. I have always had difficulty identifying with any of the characters in "Disgrace", mostly because of their motives (I particularly find it difficult to witness the counter-productive, guilty post-colonial masochism and female subjectification engaged in by Lucy) and the solidly white, male, middle class, middle-aged perspective from which the story is told. Both of these things are, of course, intended by Coetzee, to raise difficult questions around race relations, gender, sexuality, consent and power, and the stark divides between rural and urban; middle class and 'rustic' habituses. Most of all, it is an ambitious and slightly cynical tracing of the uncertain, unresolved trajectories of post-apartheid South Africa, and the intersections of gender and class through this.

"Of Mice and Men" - John Steinbeck
For its sparseness; its painful commingling of harshness and fragility, and its tragic, inevitable flow.


"The Mill on the Floss" - George Eliot
Forced to write under a male pseudonym in order to get her books published in her Victorian England, this particular work by Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) got my attention in my final year of high school. It was hard not to get mighty frustrated by its female protagonist Maggie's angst and internal conflict, in the face of circumstances and structures which seemed to endlessly and unfairly threaten to obstruct her path to fulfilment as an individual, with ambitions beyond her social and gender position [ambitions self-consciously known to the protagonist as socially 'unusual' for a woman of her time, and complicated/frustrated by her fraught relationship with her brother and the loss of her father's love]. The cognitive dissonance was palpable in this novel [not to mention being very open to a Freudian analysis!], as circumstances pulled at the protagonist's sense of guilt and duty and directly conflicted with her interest in self-realisation. I wasn't a fan of the deus ex machina device later on, but I can see that Eliot was driving at a tragic direction in doing so.

"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley
This novel was, to be cliched, mind blowing. Aldous Huxley was a genius of the dystopian narrative, and an avid mycologist at that [of the hallucinogenic kind]. Whenever people think of genetic engineering and eugenics, I'm pretty sure 'Brave New World' is lurking within those thoughts.

"The Chrysalids" - John Wyndham
Although most people would recognise Wyndham's better-known "The Day of the Triffids" (of which I'm also a big fan), "The Chrysalids" is actually in some ways my favourite. Its eerie post-apocalyptic [post-nuclear holocaust] rendering of an agrarian, Colonial American Pilgrim-style, fundamentalist pseudo-Christian frontier settlement 're-taking the wild', and violently obsessed with weeding out any signs of radiation-induced mutant deviation from 'God's Image' (whether in plant, in farm animal, or in their own town members -- including even their children) is brilliantly executed by Wyndham (and begs the questions: 'What is 'normal', anyway?' And: 'Is change necessarily a bad thing?'). Mutantly telepathic teenagers seeking out solidarity and belonging with one another, and driven into the clandestine practice of their strange new gifts - in wary but willful defiance of their oppressive parents and town officials - is such a wonderful allegory for the class clashes, anti-establishment youth-driven movements, and sexual revolution going on in Wyndham's then-1960s Britain.

"Heart of Darkness" - Joseph Conrad
When I first saw "Apocalypse Now" as a teenager, and was told it was a modern film adaptation of "Heart of Darkness", I knew I had to seek out the novel. Conrad slowly and chillingly charts the deep madness, horror and exploitation resting at the heart of the seemingly 'ordered', profitable and 'boy's own adventure' European colonial expansion into Africa. The book flows just like the river through the Congo, unwinding with shock, chaos and systematically detached violence, as the protagonists journey deeper into the madness of unbidden revelation: confronting the terrible heart of imperialism, culture shock, dislocation and psychic disarray.

"White Noise" - Don DeLillo
Deliciously post-modern, wry, and brimming with social commentary on middle class, consumerist America at the time I first read it. I suspect if I were to read it again though, I might find some aspects of "White Noise" a little wanky. We'll see.

"Great Expectations" - Charles Dickens
"So new to him...So old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!"
- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations", volume 1 Chapter VIII, p. 59

"Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs" - Hunter S. Thompson
What can I say about the gonzo genius Duke? "Hell's Angels" was the first Hunter S. Thompson book I read, and for a while its intimate, free-flowing, ethnographic style of research and expression got me desiring a career in journalism (until I realised where my strengths really resided and decided to go the academic path --- as a social researcher).

"The Catcher in the Rye" - J.D. Salinger
The classic coming-of-age novel. Read this when I was seventeen. Like so many before me.

"Ishmael" - Daniel Quinn
This is the book which first articulated what I have always felt is 'wrong' with our present way of living in the world, but could never before fully put a finger on: totalitarian agriculture.Although the 'literary' devices used by Quinn seem at first a little corny (and the sub-title 'An adventure of mind and spirit' is a tad 'new-ageish'), the ideas conveyed throughout this book are incredibly eye-opening and at times deliciously subversive, using a very simple yet effective Socratic method. Gets you re-thinking the givenness of human culture/s (especially the hegemony of agricultural/industrial societies) and inspires you to want to work towards changes. An accessible work, appealing to many who might otherwise be put off if the same ideas had been communicated through a more academic text. I recommend this book to everyone. If nothing else, it will certainly give you a new perspective to consider.

"Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" - Michel Foucault
Foucault is one of the giants of post-structuralist thought (although in terms of French theorists, I'm extending a lot more towards Bourdieu these days for theoretical understandings Foucault didn't quite touch upon). "Discipline and Punish" was the first Foucault book I read, introduced to me by my Honours supervisor while I was writing my honours thesis, critically examining the government's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers on the Australian mainland and excised ocean migration zones. In particular, Foucault's development through "Discipline and Punish" of the architectural concept of the 'Panopticon' and theories of surveillance, power and the internalisation of punishment through self-regulation (imposed by a constant awareness of the threat of being watched in modern societies) was the beginning of my acquaintance with post-structuralist critical understandings of contemporary social systems and people's relationships with these. Foucauldian theory has had a massive influence on my intellectual growth, and contributed a great deal to my understanding of the ways in which power, agency and 'technologies of the self' operate and flow.

"1984" - George Orwell
Orwell's "1984" is an unparallelled dystopian narrative. It was not so much an imagining of the future, but an allegory of Orwell's present world of the 1940s ("1984" being an anagram of 1948, the year during which Orwell was in the process of writing the book). It remains to this day a powerfully chilling and almost viscerally oppressive indictment of all forms of totalitarianism, surveillance, fascism, the rigid reproduction of class hierarchy, and the modern politics of war and cult of personality as devices for power, control and endless subordination. Orwell is by far my favourite author. His social commentary and critique was woven so seamlessly and incisively into narrative form. Read Orwell and you'll be going a long way to understanding what the 20th Century was all about (and possibly what the future may also hold, if we haven't learnt anything yet).

"Fahrenheit 451" - Ray Bradbury
A dystopian novel written with such poetry, tragedy and poignant hope and striving. Loved it.

Sophokles' tragic plays "Oedipus Rex" and "Antigone" (these were the only decent plays I got a chance to read in high school. Every time a good Shakespeare or classical tragic play was about to come up for study, I had already moved to a new high school and thus (unfortunately) new curriculum. In fact, I managed to fall through the cracks on all the good Shakespeares. Only ever got to read "Romeo and Juliet" during my school years. Woe is me). :P

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - James Joyce
Because it was the first Joyce novel I read - as a teenager - and its ending ("silence, exile and cunning") stuck with me, as did the draining impression of those damn Jesuits);

Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" (for its delicious paranoia and suburban dystopia);

Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (I was a big fan of the narrative style (spliced through with letters/correspondence) when I read it at seventeen years of age; also -- Dracula!);

Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" (its rather banal coming-of-age anguish and struggle might seem a little self-indulgent and emo today (a la 'girl, interrupted'), but given Plath's life (and death), it is crushing to read);

Lastly, George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (a prime example that allegory can work, if you use anthropomorphised farm animals).