A while ago somebody posted a list of fifteen books they had liked on the Internet, the rule being that it had to be put together in fifteen minutes.

A while ago somebody posted a list of fifteen books they had liked on the Internet, the rule being that it had to be put together in fifteen minutes.

Others followed suit. I thought what a great idea and did the same, my rules being no Mona Lisa equivalents, like Hamlet, and thry didn’t have to be “great,” just to have had a great effect on me.

And I forgot to post it. I just came across it. Here it is. Perhaps others would like to do the same?

And let us salute the inventor who was NOT me. Will somebody please tell me who it was?

Anthony Haden-Guest

Top fifteen

In A Free State by V S Naipaul

Almost anything by JG Ballard

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

The Princess Casamassima or The Bostonians by Henry James 

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick

Freaky Deaky or La Brava by Elmore Leonard

Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes by Harry Graham

The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh. Or The Cutting Room

The longer nonsense poems of Edward Lear

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Underworld USA Trilogy by James Ellroy

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann