A little light relief

I am still working my way through Crime and Punishment, and will make it through to the end.

However, as a little light relief, and also to put off having to pick it up just now, I was thinking about books that I would put on my top 100. My friend Jo, for her next significant birthday, has asked her friends and family to get her a copy of their favourite book. For me, this is akin to Nick Hornby's main character in High Fidelity (whose name I cannot for the life of me remember) being asked to put together his top 5 records. I couldn't estimate how many books I've read in my lifetime (on an average week's holiday, I'll read 4 or 5 if not more), and I have a nagging feeling that as soon as I pick one, I will think of 5 others I prefer!! So, to help me in my thinking for Jo's birthday (and Jo, if you're reading, you may like to stop now or no surprise for you!) - my top 100 books that everyone should read would include:

The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Thomas - a brilliant mystery based on a PhD student who finds a work by the author she is studying in a bookshop - the work is extremely rare, and no-one alive has ever read it, because everyone who has ever read it has died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. The book then follows her as she reads the book and gets drawn into the mystery of it. I won't go into any more detail because I think it's best discovered for yourself, but read it! Best book I read last year...I think!

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The story of a small boy who is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinth of books which would otherwise have been in danger of being destroyed or forgotten. As a rite of passage, he chooses a book to take home, understanding that he is then taking responsibility for the survival of that book. As he reads the book and grows up, he becomes drawn into the mystery of the author. It's quite dark but absolutely compelling.

A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami. Anything by Murakami could have made it onto this list, but this is the first one I read and so I think made the biggest impact. Murakami is one of Japan's most read authors of modern times, and with good reason. The plot of this novel is almost impossible to outline and do justice to - look it up on Amazon - but the key feature of anything by Murakami is the way he draws you into an utterly surreal and often comic world, but in such a way that you do not notice you're moving away from reality until you realise that you are reading about a character whose ears have the power, when uncovered, to improve sex, or the hunt for a manic depressive in a sheep outfit, or a hotel which has a hidden world on the 19th floor which very occasionally appears...and it seems completely usual. Murakami's powers of imagination and story telling are amazing, and I went on from this novel to read all of his other novels.

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde. Books are again central to this (I'm spotting a theme in books that appeal to me!), but in a very different way. Fforde creates a world where travel into the interior of novels is possible, Swindon is the capital of England, dodos have been revived (slightly unsuccessfully), and time travel is not only possible, but used as a means of policing. Oh, and the Crimean War is still running by the 1980s. It can be read on a very simple level, enjoying the premise of the story - nominally a mystery, where Thursday Next (the main character) attempts to track down and stop the criminal who is kidnapping minor characters from the original copies of novels and holding them to ransom. If he doesn't get what he wants, he plans to kidnap Jane Eyre and murder her, meaning that Jane would disappear from all copies of the novel, and ruin one of the classics of English literature. (Martin would be glad of this, as he still holds that Jane Eyre is one of the dullest books ever written). Beyond this storyline, though, the novel is littered with literary references, and so can be read with a faint feeling of smugness/bewilderment as you place, or fail to place, the references. It's brilliantly constructed, funny, and gripping, and again I went on to read the rest of Fforde's work.

I could go on - I love recommending books - but will stop there, and try and work further through Crime and Punishment! If you try any of the above and like them, let me know...