My Personal Canon

What have books made me? I am a librarian, a PhD student, a pleasure-reader, a follower of bookish aesthetics. I would not be a whole person without books: I would not have a career, nor interests. I cannot, therefore, choose just a few books for my personal canon. At every stage of my life, books have set me on a course that dictated – or perhaps mirrored – who I was. Any artist, theorist, connoisseur, though, goes through phases of what they enjoy; as such, a list mirroring who I am is also a list demonstrating who I have been. Man is certainly more than seven ages, but for the purposes of list-making the Shakespearean seven, plus a smattering of witchcraft, will surely do.

I could not only include books, of course: I could easily write a list like this for music that shepherded me, and I have always loved films and paintings and cooking which have also developed my sense of self and anchored me to an outside world; it is with books, though, that I soared, and which have become a shorthand for my identity, and I am compelled to write my own history in. The meaning of the book may have changed across my life, but the power of that relationship has not.

In my first several ages, books were the companion to my sadness: I was a child of solitude, disliked and told about it, and I was happiest alone with dolls and books. At this stage, the earliest inclinations of other people considering me a ‘bookish person’ began to show, and I was quite happy to live up to the expectations. By the time of my ‘maidenhood’ this had become an identity, and I used it to relate to other people as well as exploring myself.

INFANT

Rodger Loses His Marbles

This was the first book I ever learned to read, and grumpy Rodger is exactly the kind of hero that sets you up for a life of literary fiction.

Babette Cole

Babette’s anarchic style is emblematic of a particular style of children’s book: take an obvious story, and put a twist on it to bring it more up-to-date. In the 90s, this was Prince Charming being the overworked house help and the most literal definition of a ‘horse girl’ possible.

Mr Galliano’s Circus

Like any child who stayed with their grandparents a lot, I read old books belonging to my grandmother or my father or my uncle. Novelisations of Star Wars, outdated detective novels, children’s editions of classics (I had no business reading Gulliver’s Travels at 8 or 9), and of course so much of the British stalwart Enid Blyton found their way onto my bookshelves, but these are the ones I probably re-read the most. The happy ending of running away to join the circus is that your whole family come, of course, and the children are bright and bonny and eager for adventure at all times. I yearned for adventure for much of my youth, and continue to be surprised that there are people who wouldn’t take the chance to travel with Dr Who or transform into vampires, even now.

The Horse and His Boy

If I had to choose a favourite Chronicle of Narnia, it would likely be one of the ones with Prince Caspian, or perhaps The Magician’s Nephew, as I think they really grow with the reader and stand up to repeated rereading, but the one that really captured my imagination was The Horse and His Boy. Aravis was one of my favourite characters, and although as an adult I can recognise the portrayal of Calormen as racist, it created such a full and colourful world and still influences my desire to travel to The Middle East and experience a desert.

Visual Media: Gerry Anderson

The music, the movement, and the fashion of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and Stingray all combined into something charming and enjoyable. There was always drama and action, and yet somehow the best drama was in the quietest moments. Creating that with immovable puppet faces is a triumph.

Music: Michael Jackson

Michael was the biggest star in the world at that time, and I was not exactly looking for deep cuts. If you don’t enjoy Earthsong, The Jackson 5, and disco, then you surely were not wiggling in front of your CRT in pyjamas like I was.

SCHOOLBOY

George Orwell

I first read Orwell’s 1984 at 10 and it changed my life. As the first serious, adult book I’d read, I naturally found it deep, complicated, and interesting. I gradually added to my Orwell library over my school years and read 1984 again for my studies, only creating a deeper love with the added nuance and context added by my own ageing. My favourite is still Homage to Catalonia, as nothing can break your heart quite like the death of a steadfast belief, but any and all of his work reaches out to who I wanted to be back then and finds her within me.

Meg Cabot

Meg is the queen of socially conscious, zany realism. Even the characters in her anachronistic romances (some aimed at adults! Beware, lest you be letting a child read these!) feel fully realised, and her feminism and multiracial advocacy seeped into my bones… as did her style of writing lists in her diaries.

I Capture The Castle

This is possibly the book I have re-read the most. It’s beautiful and sad and full of art and yearning – a general, faceless yearning for all things that represent life to a young person, from perfume to music to your sister’s boyfriend. It’s also funny, and chock full of wish fulfilment. Living in a castle?? 1920s glamour?? Mild witchcraft?? Honestly there is so much to love in this book.

Alex Rider

I didn’t realise it was fanfic at the time. I may have been online, but I was not as online as all that: aware of Tumblr’s ways and aesthetics without being on it, and completely unaware of the less moderated fansites than those put up by American TV companies and major publishers. Still, Alex Rider was my first experience of being so into something you have to seek out other people who love it, and create your own terrible self-insert (never finished, never shared) fanfic.

Visual Media: Sailor Moon

The Fox Kids lineup was something special. From Jackie Chan Adventures to The Amazing Spider-Man, the media they showed was a magical portal to a world of action. Totally Spies is what we acted out in the playground (as a confident blonde I was always cast as Clover), but Sailor Moon was what had me spellbound and loving every aspect, from animation to music to fashion.

Music: We Are Scientists

The music of my schoolboy years was very hard to choose, as my world exploded from having a couple of old tapes and a Dido CD to being what I spent all my money on and the thing that I consciously educated myself about. We Are Scientists were something I discovered from MTV (their videos are generally iconic) and went out of my way to find and follow.

MAIDEN

The History Boys

My friends and I thought we were living in The History Boys. As everyone pushed for places at elite universities we saw ourselves in this ragtag group of boys (we all thought we were Scripps) and tried to embrace “sheer, calculated silliness” alongside our love of classics.

The Brontë Sisters

The first time I went into something deliberately was when I read the Brontës. My friend and I were deeply into them – their lore as well as their works – and they stood for a kind of self-educated, sad, strong woman we aspired to be.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

First off: I have never read this book. I heard about it in a Meg Cabot novel and assumed it was more famous that it was, then found they didn’t have it in any of the libraries in Leicester. This stands in for learning that the world is bigger than you knew, for pulling on strange threads, and for discovering Abebooks.

Virgil’s Aeneid

My clique at school was the Latin nerds. I wasn’t terribly good at Latin, but I enjoyed Classics (where we could read in English) and the foundational texts of the western world have really stuck with me. When I got to university I discovered that not everybody had experienced a classical education, and I suddenly felt sorry for those who never got the chance, and realised quite how much passing a test I didn’t study for at the age of 11 really had changed my life.

Visual Media: Terry Gilliam

I can’t remember which of his films I watched first, but I bought all the DVDs and even enjoyed the films other people hate (Brothers Grimm I get you <3). The highs of Gilliam cannot be matched.

Music: Lloyd Cole

I don’t know why I latched so thoroughly onto somebody whose peak fame was before I was born, but I love Lloyd. His Folksinger vol. 2 live album was probably my most listened in my youth, and if you get the chance you should seek it out.

Sexuality and intellectualism set me free. They came together – an awareness of potential, that how I speak and act were charged and powerful – as they do for many young people, and it was through books that I crystallised my thinking and pushed myself to be ‘more’. At this stage, I was reading a lot of poetry, and deliberately curating a collection that was post-colonial: in translation, diverse, diving back through history to find representation of and within different movements. I was also at university, and finding that I was good at it and in the right place, which was as alchemic and intoxicating as anything – book or person – I might have found myself attracted to.

LOVER

Plath

Sylvia Plath has given me my best friends and my perspective. I have written a Master’s thesis on some of her poems and seen myself represented in her caustic prose and indelible metaphors.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s

I wrote an entire essay apropos of nothing about how this book has shadowed my journey to becoming a cultural theorist.

The Secret History

This is a performative read for me, as I’m sure it is for many. I read it late in my ‘lover’ lifespan, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. The classics harkened back to who I’d once been; the classism and the presentation of women spoke of the worlds I felt I’d rejected with my modern Mechanics Institute of a university; the self-conscious cult of those who love the book beckoned me into a world of slightly pretentious Sensibility that has slipped its way into my identity and not worked its way out.

Roland Camberton

Where would any self-respecting pretentious book nerd be without something nobody has heard of? I bought Rain on the Pavements by accident from the bargain bin of Foyle’s South Bank, where it had been reprinted due to its John Minton cover. It has since gone out of print again and that seems profoundly unfair: Camberton is the author Dark Academia has been dreaming of, living in their mushroom-infested garrets and trying to make something happen. If you only read one book from this list, read Scamp – it’s like 1950s Ottessa Moshfegh, the book Giles Coren thought he was writing, and a humbling experience for anybody who yearns on Substack.

Visual Media: A Single Man

I saw this film and appreciated the studied but not schooled skills behind it. It resonated that somebody who loved a medium but worked in a different one could bring perspective and craft that honoured the same medium in its own vocabulary but with fresh priorities. This is what encountering Anna Biller for the first time felt like.

Music: Lana del Rey

Lana makes music so I don’t have to. She’s doing it for the poetry bitches, the film lovers, the girlies who fully believe their own half-fake backstory, and everything she does is beautiful.

SOLDIER

Ian McEwan

McEwan is an author given to me by university. I tried Atonement as a teen and found Bryony annoying; coming back to it later, I realised that was the point. McEwan’s books are painfully middle-class, but then so am I, and in putting his characters into situations like reciting poetry as a way to escape gang violence (Saturday) or using lyrics as the title of a dark, introspective book with nothing whatsoever to do with the song (The Child in Time) he uses his own proclivities playfully, and demonstrates the polish of a creative writing degree across his whole body of work.

Ismail Kadare

I read this because the cover was shiny and I liked it. I hadn’t read much translated fiction at this point, and certainly nothing that wasn’t a ‘classic’, and it showed me a whole other world.

Ford Madox Ford

A profoundly beautiful, gripping writer. Ford writes with love of the past and future simultaneously, and his books are so morally grey that you change your own perspective constantly reading them.

The Moth Diaries

This book is everything I stand for: Romanticism, academia, lightly funny and deft with relationships. It’s a book that knows what it is and who its audience is, and even if that’s one or two people a year is that not worth being in the trenches for?

Visual Media: The Misfits

I have always, always loved Miller, and I came to Marilyn through him. Together they made an elegy for their love, and learning about how the ending came to be symbolised, to me, that they both understood their art, and the sacrifice it takes to get art ‘right’.

Music: Taylor Swift

It sometimes takes shrugging off your own misconceptions to find something that you love. My first Taylor song – Love Story – resulted in me ignoring her for 20 years, but she became unignorable by 1989 and, because I can’t do anything by halves, I bought all her albums to listen to once [1] and accidentally converted myself into a serious stan.

MOTHER

Hilary Mantel

If you ask me my favourite book, I can’t answer; if you ask me my favourite author, though, there is a strong chance I will say Hilary Mantel. She is the author I want to be: studious, witty, descriptive. She fully inhabits the world she chooses for her books, and her characters are complex, robust, and cruelly detailed. I loved her from the first.

Sally Rooney

Sally’s books are worth the hype. She draws a story out of the shadows and shines light onto the inherent politics of relationships of all kinds.

The Nutcracker

I return to this story from somebody else’s mind every Christmas. To me, the magic is in Clara’s age: she is desirous, but doesn’t know what that means, and if she did she would fear it. This story is one of what a young girl would do with agency, her lack of agency, and also of really insane imagery and detail.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job

It’s insane that something I think of as entertaining and semi-disposable should make it onto this list, but it continues to live in my mind and in all the people I recommend it to. I enjoyed this book just fine, but its half-life is nowhere near done yet, and I think it’s time to say it’s more powerful than I gave it credit for.

Visual Media: Dangerous Moonlight

Anton Walbrook is perfect in this film. It’s about art, and what inspires it, and what is worth fighting for. Yes it’s a propaganda piece, but one which contains solid filmmaking fundamentals paired with the stark power of vision – vision of the characters, but also of Cecil Beaton and Richard Addinsell.

Music: Rebecca Black

Rebecca’s music is about continuing in the face of absurdity. She is the opposite of Beckett, and emblematic of the drive to make your art and control your image and deny no truth. She also absolutely slaps.

In my middle-age, I know love – comfortable, unconditional, unyielding. I look forward to a long middle-age of striving, challenging myself, and finding pleasure in difficult things. Middle-age is supposed to be easy, in the sense of having your shit together and following the path you’ve forged for yourself, and I want to fall fully into the literary niche I know is mine whilst still being capable of reading something that will disrupt me.

JUSTICE

The Pursuit of Love

This book is perfect. A romantic comedy with pathos, with a heroine so deftly sketched, and with an ending that feels even more true than real life.

Helen Oyeyemi

Helen’s books are both whimsical and frightening and profound. She is the natural heir to Angela Carter and wields feminism as a dark and unknowable power.

The English Patient

This won The Golden Booker for a reason: it might be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read. The two stories nestle together without any friction, the characters’ endings each feel both fair and unfair at the same time. Ondaatjie creates a world so knowledgeable of convention yet seemingly unbound from it that I cannot feel it as anything but true. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation was also perfect.

Notre Dame de Paris

I have never before felt so passionately that the book I am reading is fiction, yet so swept up by the narrative. I loved this book, and all Hugo’s others that I’ve read, and consider it a masterclass in showcasing your

Visual Media: Gone With The Wind

I am writing a whole PhD because of the things this film makes me think and feel.

Music: Vikingur Ólafsson

I chose this for my wedding music because it’s a delicate and almost tentative interpretation of a piece that’s recognisable but not ubiquitous. [2]

LEAN AND SLIPPERED

Mrs Death Misses Death

This book is a powerful, confusing, poetic way to understand grieving and difficult lives and possibility. I love when poets write novels, and this is a perfect example of why.

The Romantic School by Heinrich Heine

This has become the definition I use for Romanticism, but more than that it yearns for the Romantic and seeks to explain to those who don’t understand why it matters what this movement means and could mean. Heine is cynicism embodied, but also finds hope in his work in particular.

Weetzie Bat

In giving magical realism to children, in making it modern and punk and queer and Californian, Block creates a meta narrative about something she loves that passes that love onto a new generation. I was astounded when I read it.

The Stepford Wives

Nothing makes you consider your choices more than being presented with a failure of them. Levin found a fear that I find atavistic, and deeply connected to womanhood: than a person will choose you, love you, for what you are in your brain and your art and your passions and your politics, then realise that actually life would be easier with a dumb, hot woman. He wants you but devoid of everything that creates your selfhood.

Visual Media: The Cat Returns

A sweet fairytale with deeper meaning. Ghibli films are all wrestling with growing up, with past and future, and with the power of storytelling, but this one in particular speaks to me (possibly for Cary Elwes’ performance) as a wish for a guide to adulthood and a meditation on how annoying it can be to do the right thing. It’s also a sequel of sorts to A Whisper of the Heart, which explicitly tackles ambition and love and finding your identity in art.

Music: Raye

Raye is reclaiming herself. She marries the South London unapologetic with the dedicated glamour of 60s jazz and soul and musicals. She set out to assert her identity as an independent artist, and in doing so she has created a unique brilliance that shines next to other pop acts, neither eclipsing nor imitating.

How can I recommend books for a phase of life I am not yet in? I have chosen to centre the books which felt both profoundly meaningful in my life, yet cloistered in some way. Perhaps I shared my love for them with just one person, perhaps they still remind me of somebody no longer in my life, perhaps I didn’t share my love of them at all and simply hoarded them to myself, letting them influence me quietly, without the fanfare of other books I’ve loved. These are books that have changed me quietly, slipped into my influences without me noticing, and given me richness in some way beyond what I expected.

CRONE

Armadale

This is a book I got from my dad. He loved it, raves about it, even travelled to the town of Armadale on something of a whim to appreciate it, and I loved it every bit as much. All the plot of a Dickens with a true fear from the author of his own creation, and a frisson of sex and drugs and family politics in which all is not well, and full of imagery like clocks and red hair and drowning that leap from the page and dance for 750 pages.

The Last Man

Shelley is exactly as great as everyone says, and perhaps moreso. This book contains the scale we see at the end of Frankenstein throughout, and creates a socio-political world that reflects reality whilst also developing deeper insight into the nature of power and humanity than Shelley had likely directly experienced. Virtuosic, profound, and at least three different stories in one.

War & Peace

Natalia is crafted to be a paragon of womanhood, and she still models the self I hope to be. Pierre, even as an author stand-in, is profoundly sympathetic, and I relate to all his struggles about desire, politics, and propriety. Finding happiness in the end is perhaps simplistic and even undeserved, but when you get to the end of the book you can’t wish for anything else.

Emma

I have come to love Jane Austen, as all book lovers do eventually. Personally I think you have to meet the archetypes she’s writing about before you can find them funny, and as a schoolgirl I hadn’t known a marriage like The Bennetts’, or somebody as annoying as Mr Collins. I like Emma because of what and how she learns: her faux pas are not life-changing, they are hurting people’s feelings, and she wants to be better than the silliness she knows can be in her nature. I like Mr Knightley, too: I find him a grounded and hardworking aristocrat, and I respect the kind of life he wants. All of Austen’s books share some kernel of humanity with their readers, and this one is something I can enjoy looking back at what might be and still allow it to shape my actions today.

Visual Media: Sense & Sensibility

Marianne’s desires change over the course of this story, but in a way that feels very true. She doesn’t settle for Colonel Brandon, instead she sees that he offers a life she had not considered before, one that appreciates her unique talents and interests without sacrificing any aspect of her selfhood or relationships. Sometimes a good man, or a good life, is in fact attainable, and we see in the Dashwood sisters how many ways that can be achieved.

Music: St Vincent

St Vincent stands in for my own desire to be more informed than ever about the music, not simply the lyrics, of what I enjoy listening to. She is talented, and hones her talent to a razor sharpness. She is frank in her lyrics but deeply private, and never elucidates her meaning beyond what is written. To be a fan of St Vincent is to look with your own eyes at the pop star narrative and question how, why, and at what cost, and also to appreciate the craft that comes with it.

SECOND CHILDISHNESS

Heidi

Perhaps my love of saccharine-sweet, politically informed, happy-ending texts began here? I read and re-read this book several times as a kid and I don’t know what resonated, but something certainly did.

The Easter Parade

This was the first time I really was surprised to be good at reading. My dad left it on the backseat of the car during a long journey

Northern Lights

This is another book I didn’t quite realise had stayed with me. This time it was the re-read that did it: I didn’t know how much my desire to see Svalbard was based in this, I didn’t know how much my love of philosophy and own moral code built on questioning was probably influenced by this book. Now that I’ve re-read the first I will be making my way through the rest – I remember the third being my favourite, but only one image from it, so I’m deeply curious about my own past experience with these.

Rumpole of the Bailey

These were the first ‘adult’ books I really read. The caustic British humour, the ease of reading, the real-life grounding of places in London all created something that I found moreish, and I have read many of these stories – of course, as we all did back then, out of order.

Visual Media: Moulin Rouge

I will never not love this film. I think it’s beautifully crafted, melodramatic, and truly understands how music tells a story. I love the aesthetic, even its most subdued moments, and I love how deliberate and knowing it is. I lost count of how many times I’d seen this film by the age of 17, but it must be about 40 by now. I love it.

Music: The Killers

The Killers were the band I loved most of all as a teen, and I have been delighted to see how they continue to grow, together and apart. They had their own vision for glamorous indie rock & roll, and I share that vision wholeheartedly.

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[1] I still used an iPod in those days so it was actually necessary. Bring back the clickwheel, death to touchscreens.

[2] I also just really like it.

On This Topic:

• More, boy? You want MORE? OK well follow me on StoryGraph
• … Spotify …
• and Letterboxd. Though be warned I barely use this one.

To-Do:

• Collect VHS tapes from digitiser
• Write some fiction
• Reply to texts!!!

Today’s Culture:

• I’m cooking goose for Christmas! I saw one in Lidl and got very excited
• I know I’m not supposed to be buying CDs but I can’t resist zines
• I always wear the same white sweater on Christmas. Idk why. We all have our little traditions, though, don’t we.