 | The Leopard (Everyman's Library Classics) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Buy new: £7.69 / Used from: £4.50 The decline of a man and his class in 19th century Italy. I think this may be a perfect book. Every page is sublime.
|
 | Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £3.82 Booker of Bookers, and Rushdie's best. If you like verbal pyrotechnics, marvel. If not, don't bother.
|
 | Imperial Blandings: An Omnibus: "Full Moon"; "Pigs Have Wings"; "Service with a Smile" by P.G. Wodehouse
Buy used from: £13.47 or any of Wodehouse's others. Exuberant wit, loony plots.
|
 | The Big Sleep (Penguin Fiction) by Raymond Chandler
Buy new: £2.97 / Used from: £2.49 The other great Dulwich College prosemeister. Couldn't plot to save his life - especially in this book - but every sentence is a joy to read. Also try Dashiel Hammett, eg 'Red Harvest'.
|
 | Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog: To Say Nothing of the Dog (Penguin Popular Classics) by Jerome K. Jerome
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 I don't think there's anything funnier. Read and reread. Open, read page, cheer up.
|
 | Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Buy used from: £0.01 A strange, moving love story. 'Illywhacker' is also superb.
|
 | Schindler's Ark (Coronet Books) by Thomas Keneally
Buy used from: £0.01 The film is wonderful; this is even better.
|
 | War and Peace (Oxford World's Classics) by Leo Tolstoy
Buy new: £4.78 / Used from: £0.01 OK, it's long, but it's the best soap opera ever. Take it on holiday and read it quickly.
|
 | The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andric
Buy new: £7.69 / Used from: £4.98 Centuries of Balkan history seen through the eyes of the small people. Also contains the most eye-watering scene I've ever read.
|
 | The Glass Bead Game (Vintage classics) by Hermann Hesse
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £3.00 Subject matter sounds daunting (art v science; academe v life, etc), but it's a surprisingly easy read.
|
 | Great Expectations (Penguin Popular Classics) by Charles Dickens
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 (not) just a great story.
|
 | American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.01 Large, ambitious, paranoid, repulsive, corrupt, mesmerising.
|
 | The Master and Margarita (Vintage Classics) by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: £5.94 / Used from: £2.95 The Devil visits Russia. Absurdist masterpiece. I've given this to several people and everyone seems to love it.
|
 | Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Popular Classics) by Jane Austen
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 Deft, witty, ironic.
|
 | The Aubrey Maturin Series (The Aubrey/Maturin Series) by P OBrian
Buy new: £321.99 Austen for boys: beautifully written, full of irony, great sense of place and character; and great battles!
|
 | Flashman (The Flashman Papers) by George MacDonald Fraser
Buy new: £4.94 / Used from: £0.74 Crime may not pay, but poltroonery does. Hilarious, extremely well written, and apparently reliable on the history. There are 11 or 12 in the series, and they get better and better.
|
 | Tom Jones (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry Fielding
Buy new: £3.64 / Used from: £2.87 A comic Rake's progress. Great fun.
|
 | Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Buy new: £11.77 / Used from: £23.14 Oxford satire. Wonderful wit. There must be cheaper editions than this.
|
 | King Solomon's Ring (Routledge Classics) (Routledge Classics) by Konrad Lorenz
Buy new: £5.66 / Used from: £3.97 Warm-hearted and heart-warming, but not anthropocentric, descriptions of his favourite animals, by one of the founders of ethology, happily back in print.
|
 | The Odyssey (Penguin Classics) by Homer
Buy new: £4.03 / Used from: £2.50 Episodic story of the return of Odysseus from Troy. Read '1000 Nights' straight after and compare stories.
|
 | A History of the English Speaking Peoples (One Volume Abridgement of all 4 Volumes) by Winston Churchill
Buy used from: £28.19 'Great men' history from a great (and therefore partial) patriot. But the prose sparkles.
|
 | 1066 and All That by W.C. Sellar
Buy new: £2.46 / Used from: £0.83 I read this as a kid and enjoyed. Now I know more history, it's funnier.
|
 | The First Rumpole Omnibus by John Mortimer
Buy new: £7.69 / Used from: £0.01 Gentle, civilised humour, underpinned by a strong belief in the value of our traditional freedoms. (I read them in the bath - too much information?)
|
 | Our Man in Havana (Vintage Classics) by Graham Greene
Buy new: £3.05 / Used from: £2.50 A great writer. I slightly prefer what he slightingly called his 'entertainments' - the less miserable stuff.
|
 | The Betrothed (Classics) by Alessandro Manzoni
Buy new: £8.44 / Used from: £2.68 I like books in which stuff happens. Plenty happens in this, not least a plague.
|
Listmania!
