Olaf Stapledon: The Star Maker

Philosophy is supposed to be a series of footnotes to Plato. In the same way, the science fiction I have read might be said to be footnotes to Stapledon.

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. Arthur C Clarke called it 'the most powerful work of imagination ever written.' Doris Lessing, nobel laureate, and Virginia Woolf heaped praise on it.

It isn't really a novel. It's essentially an overview of a person's experience becoming more and more aware of all the life in the universe, and of the Star Maker himself. As such, it works like Russian dolls in reverse: each succeeding vision is larger than the rest. You wonder where the inventiveness comes from. You wonder if he's ever going to stop. You wonder what he was on when he wrote this.

Finally there is an encounter with the Star Maker himself, which, amazingly, doesn't disappoint.
Truly a classic.

Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi

What a gem of a book.

'Guns and knives may break our calves, but we won't wear your silly scarves!'

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is a insider story of:

• the Iranian revolution,
• the Gulf (Iran-Iraq) War (about which we in the West were so cruelly complacent),
• how fugitives to the West are mostly welcomed by the alternative cultures, not the mainstream ones
• Teenagerhood
• Freedom and its contradictions
  

and with a walk on part by

• God.

It's all told in cartoon form. It's the best thing I've ever read on Iran and one of the best books I've read about living under an Islamist regime.

I found it the sort of book you have to put down while you walk around and try to think about it. Things like:

• Why don't we understand Iranians as victims of totalitarianism, quite as much as people in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia? Surely they are.
• How much teenagers need surrogate parents and grandparents;
• How people can end up on the streets; and get off them again.

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Neal Stephenson's baroque 'trilogy'

The mix of science, history, speculation and story-telling makes the 2000 plus pages of these four books as entertaining as the best things I have ever read. Cryptonomicon was the first, set in the Second World War and the 1990s; the three others followed afterwards, set in the Scientific Revolution. Hugely, utterly satisfying. I cannot remember enjoying a book more. My only real disappointment with these books was that they came to an end.

Scoop: Evelyn Waugh

My ideal of the comic novel. Funny, but not crude or malicious. Improbable but just probable enough to keep your disbelief suspended. Gentle but not soggy or woolly. Satirical but not bitter. Every character is funny, but each in a different way. None is irritating. A pert prose style devoid of any self-indulgence. Endlessly quotable, like a Monty Python sketch. Long may the questing vole, feather footed, pass through the plashy fen.

Vanity Fair: William Makepeace Thackeray

I enjoyed this book through one long summer and courtesy of Librivox and my Ipod.
I suppose Victorian novels were what Victorians did instead of soap operas, so maybe listening to its quarter of a million words read out is appropriate. I loved the relentless satirizing of everything, even love itself. I loved the warmth. I loved the way he kept the central love story of the plot right to the last page. I think Becky Sharp would have wrapped me round her little finger. Worse, I would have enjoyed it.
There are one of two sticky spots when it appears even Thackeray didn't read over his own work, perhaps he was in a hurry, but like all great books, I want to go back and do it all again.

The Great Gatsby: F Scott Fitzgerald

A short novel like The Moon and Sixpence -- see below -- written at almost the same time, and also about obsessive love and the destruction it causes. More amusing than Somerset Maugham, though, and elegantly assembled, as neat and complete as a theorem.
If books were people this would be '20s flapper, fresh, quirky, flip, light-footed, beautiful. I found this book in a mission school library in the middle of Cote d'ivoire, read it by the light of a generator with the grasshoppers singing all around, finished it, went back to the beginning and read it again. A perfect dance partner of a book.

The moon and sixpence: W Somerset Maugham

A novel based loosely on the life Paul Gauguin: frustrated city type forsakes everything so that he can give expression, through art, to what is burning inside him. Ends up in squalor in Tahiti, finally painting the stuff he wants. A novel about the compulsion to create art and (when this compulsion is allowed to be Lord) how it both creates and destroys. I think the 'moon and sixpence' reference is to someone chasing the moon in the sky and missing the sixpence at his feet.