I'm not going to give much explanation as to why the books on my list
of favourites have earned their places there: I think that, should you
recognise a particular book, you'll understand why it's there. I might
add that, in searching my bookshelves for the best of them, I thought
about all the other books, the ones I haven't read yet - how many of
them, I wonder, would and should have been mentioned here, if only I
could get around to reading them.
Anyway, for the present, these are my favourites:
Crime and Punishment, for being the greatest novel ever written,
Three Men in a Boat, for being one of the funniest,
Dracula, for being the silliest, and riddled with continuity
holes.
Peyton Place, for its risque daring,
The Day of the Jackal, for the brilliance of its mastermind,
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, for being full of heartache,
Brothers of the Head, for being so unspeakably weird.
The Loved One, because no book was ever blacker,
A Prayer for Owen Meany, for making me cry from Heathrow to Tullamarine,
Far From the Madding Crowd, for the anguish of the tale,
The Cardboard Crown, for telling history with such joy.
Wake in Fright, for being the Great Australian Novel,
Brideshead Revisited, if only for Sebastian Flyte,
The Day of the Triffids, for making the world a little more eerie,
The Story of San Michele, for its love of animals, and for making
me cry.
The Collector Collector, for being narrated by an antique bowl,
A Dog of Your Own, for entertaining me since I was fifteen years
old,
The Red Hourglass, for bringing entomology to gobsmacking life.
But my favourite book, my desert island book, the one I'd keep if I
had to sacrifice them all, is William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying;
the epitome of enviable writing, in which not a word wanders astray;
it's too sad to talk about, too beautiful to describe.
These, of course, are books I've loved as an adult; behind them stretches
a path of stories that, as a child, I admired equally as much, and possibly
still do. Some of them, the ones I remember best, are:
The far-away and magical Magic Far-Away Tree,
The exotic, other-wordly Horse and His Boy,
Milly Molly Mandy, as much for the pictures as for the words,
Olga the Polga, for just being about a guinea-pig.
Stormy, Misty's Fowl, which was less book, to me, than jewel,
Storm Boy, and Sounder, for being about animals and also
making me cry,
Seven Little Australians, for being quietly endearing,
The wild colonial Midnite, the funniest book ever written for
a child.
The Tombs of Atuan, for being mysterious and puzzling,
The long-forgotten Cats, for being frightening and startling,
The Magic Pudding, for that bad-tempered creature wearing a bowl,
And, for its wayward, frustrated, earnest title character, The Secret
Diary of Adrian Mole.
There's others, of course, all sorts of them, which in fairness must
get honourable mentions - E. F. Benson's Lucia series, all of
Nancy Mitford's novels, most of Wilkie Collins' work - the list goes
on and on. I won't inflict them all on you, but in thinking about the
books I love, I naturally thought about the ones I can't abide, and
its only right to nominate a couple of those which, though Hell itself
might freeze over, will never darken my bedside table again. In fairness,
because I don't think it the best situation in which to encounter a
novel, I'll leave out those books which I studied and loathed at school
– The Young Wife, My Brother Jack, Madame Bovary,
to name but a ghastly few. I apologise in advance to any fans I may
offend: we each have our own tastes, and a book, loved or hated, has
the power to raise passions, and to polarise. Novels that have made
me shudder include:
Jude, the spineless, the tedious, the whining, the Obscure,
Bleak House, more correctly known as Boring House,
Another house, the Charterhouse, this one in Parma – I wouldn't
even go to Parma on holiday.
The Catcher in the Rye, for the vileness of that self-indulgent
brat,
Perfume, because claptrap by any other name can smell just as
bad.
And lastly there's the king of them, the novel whose incomprehensible
dreadfulness puts all others in the shade, Tristram Shandy, that
least humorous of humorous books, that ever-reliable inducer of coma
– I cannot recommend it highly enough to those who suffer from
insomnia. Were I stuck on a desert island with Tristram Shandy, by the
end of the first day I'd be offering up a prayer to Faulkner, and taking
my chances with the sharks.
Sonya Hartnett. August, 2001