Reading list: Kiran Dass’ Best Ever Booklist

By Kiran Dass

When Claire Mabey asked me to compile a list of what I reckon are the Best Books Ever, it seemed like such an insurmountable task. I’m used to being asked to create lists that fit a certain theme, or finding books for a specific brief for a specific person. But this personal list is not a list that is trying to be all things to all people. It’s all about the books that I love, that have shaped me as a reader, writer and person over the years. All of these books have been definitive, unforgettable reading experiences for me and are titles that I still stand behind, no matter how much time has passed since I first read them.

The Years (2017)
Annie Ernaux

Extraordinary! As in, jaw-dropping. This is a radical approach to the memoir, it's a collective history that is actually a kind of work of reportage. A generous and attentive book, It’s where autofiction, biography, history and sociology intersect. Written by French author Annie Ernaux, it’s her memoir but is actually a collective biography. It spans her entire life beginning in Normandy 1940 when she was born, and through the decades up to 2006. She calls it a compilation of abbreviated memories. It’s told in the third person, there’s no ‘I’ or ‘We’ as she records her personal experience against the backdrop of wider social and cultural change, and we sweep through historical events as she remembers them. It is the story of all of us. We move through history, politics, the arts, feminism, immigration, unemployment, the pill, legalisation of abortion, the aids crisis, the collapse of the Berlin wall and how we have become a consumerist society. We look at the first heart transplant, the first colour TV, the first Walkman, and remember the “Y2K meltdown”? Ernaux spent decades taking notes in preparation for writing this book, so it’s literally her life’s work. Exacting and journalistic, The Years is attentive, generous and inclusive. It’s absolutely majestic in its wide scope and I found it exhilarating. 

Get your copy here.

Lost in Music: A Pop Odyssey (1987)
Giles Smith

This is the book that High Fidelity tried so hard to be, and is the bar against which I judge all music memoirs. Having read it seventeen times, it’s my most re-read book and the pleasure has never diminished. It’s my comfort read. John Peel was a big fan of this book, and who are we to argue? A sportswriter and music journalist, this is Smith’s insider’s account of what it means to be a music head. He vividly evokes what it’s like to grow up obsessed with pop music and the heady adventures of finding it, buying it and trying to play it. From discovering a love of music as a child in 1960s Essex, failed relationships, his struggles in the brokenarsed cult band Cleaners from Venus and his often hilarious experiences as a music journalist, Smith perfectly captures the thrill, excitement, madness and pain of being a music lover, so anyone who has ever bought and loved a record, been to a gig or played in a band ought to read this. It’s crack-up funny, charming and warm. 

Ask your local indie bookshop if they can hunt you down a copy or check out Better World Books.

The Patrick Melrose Novels (2012 as a collection)
Edward St. Aubyn

Warning! This brutal suite of five semi-autobiographical novels is so utterly moreish you won’t be able to get enough of the savagely despicable characters. Even though I have the entire collection of this series of fives novels, I’ve deliberately never read the final book At Last. What am I saving it for? I just don’t want the series to end.

With wonderfully droll titles like Never Mind and Bad News, these novels are a critique of the messed-up English upper classes, and chart Patrick Melrose’s decadent and highly dysfunctional life as he grows up and deals with toxic parents, alcoholism and heroin abuse. His selfish, disinterested and pill-popping mother Eleanor unforgivably turns a blind eye to the ongoing and horrific abuse Patrick suffers at the hands of his father David, leading Patrick on a devastating trail of self-destruction. I discovered this series after publisher Fergus Barrowman and ex books and culture editor at the NZ Listener Guy Somerset both independently and enthusiastically recommended them to me. Grateful.

Get your copy here

Music for Torching (1999)
A.M. Homes

I chanced upon this incendiary novel while shelving at the bookshop where I worked. Attracted by the title (named after a Billie Holiday record) and stark Granta cover, I read it, and found it the most intense, hyper real literary experience. I’d told a colleague I was reading it and wide-eyed, she told me about the time she had read it while looking after some children in a playground. She was completely immersed in the book as the children ran amok around her. The first chapter of Music for Torching began as a short story in the New Yorker, and it’s a firecracker of an opener to this novel about infidelity, boredom and violence. We meet Elaine and Paul, an American middle class suburban couple. They have two sons, a beautiful home, and a seemingly normal, mundane life. But Homes scrapes away the veneer of the American Dream and reveals a perverse underbelly in this deeply unsettling and provocative novel. It’s irresistible and caustic reading. “Homes doesn’t so much critique suburban American life as shoot it, stab it, chuck it in the back of her car and drive it into a lake,” a reviewer wrote in The Times. 

You can read an interview I did with Homes, here.

Chat with your local indie bookstore about finding you a copy.

Easter Parade (1976)
Richard Yates 

Joan Didion says this is the best Richard Yates novel, and while I love them all, I do agree. An exquisite observer and writer, his novels are infused with a deep and unshakeable sadness, but there is always empathy humming below the surface. The opening line of The Easter Parade sets the tone: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce…” The sisters in question are Sarah and Emily, and in this book we follow their lives from the 1930s and how they have been affected by their alcoholic mother and distant newspaper worker father who lives in the city. Yates’ rinsed out, alcohol-soaked and desperate characters navigate the banal brutality of everyday life, often against the austere steely grey tones of New York City. The Easter Parade, like all of his stories, deals with the crushing of the human heart, the vortex of moral regret, despair, broken dreams and broken people.

Talk to your local indie bookstore about ordering you a copy (or check your library).

The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ (1982)
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984)
Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend was such a brilliant writer and satirist! And her immensely quotable creation Adrian Mole is one of my enduringly favourite literary characters ever. I got the books out from the Waipa Primary School library in Ngaruawahia when I was growing up. I loved that bright red lipstick on the cover. Hot on the heels of my inexplicable first crush ever, which was on Duran Duran’s drummer Roger Taylor (of all the members?!) came the socially awkward and bumbling fictitious character Mole - an insufferable, bespectacled nerd living in working class Leicester under the gloomy shadow of Thatcher. Family life, school, crushes (he’s profoundly in love with Pandora, you know), his self-deluded budding career as a writer are neatly trussed up in social and political commentary. And who could forget the time Mole tried sniffing glue and accidentally stuck a model aeroplane to his nose? This iconic opening sequence from the television show based on the books sums the whole thing up. 

Townsend continued writing Adrian Mole books, charting his life into middle age. Did you know he went on to be a bookseller? Too relatable. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is a hilarious instalment. In it, he is 33 ¾. I remember being a bit annoyed that Townsend didn’t make him 33 ⅓ - a record speed age. Is that too nerdy?

Get your copies here

Passport to Hell (1936)
Robin Hyde 

When I first moved to Wellington from Auckland, I used to see a handsome fellow around town who always at the same rock shows and film society screenings as me. One day, he sauntered into Unity Books, where I worked at the time. I remember paying close attention to see what section he would squizz first. Art? Music? Graphic Novels? He made a straight beeline for the NZ Non Fiction shelves. “Brainy!” I thought. After scanning them, he came up to the counter and after chatting for a while, he asked for my phone number! Later, he told me he’d come in looking for Robin Hyde, who I'd never read before. I was grateful for the introduction. 

With its vivid and harsh realism, Passport to Hell, which journalist, novelist and poet Hyde wrote in six weeks while recovering from morphine addiction, got under my skin. An important New Zealand history and war book, it is an unflinching and gutsy account of WWI anti-hero Private James Douglas Stark (bomber, Fifth Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force) who was hot with his temper and quick with his fists. A staunch advocate for the underdog, Hyde tells Stark’s tales from the frontline and beyond with a diagnostic journalistic eye and novelistic tension. Her own life story is just as gripping. (And yes, the fellow and I are still together).

Get your copy here.

Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005)
Simon Reynolds

In my house, we refer to this as ‘the yellow pages’. It’s a book I still constantly refer to and my own copy is dog-earred, riddled with marginalia, underlinings, and is marked by tea spills. Post-punk rolled up its sleeves and took care of the promise and unfinished business that punk rock left behind in the mid 1970s. Music critic Simon Reynolds has written a fairly definitive deep dive into the bands, labels and zines of post punk music. Reading this book gave me real insight into looking at music from a regional perspective - not just Manchster, but Sheffield, Glasgow, Leeds and Liverpool. How scenes are formed. Rip it Up helped expand my record collection, and shed new light on the records I already had. Full of interviews and esoterica, it’s an important artefact to me - a solid and intelligent look at the most sonically adventurous music from the time period, and the cultural, social and political conditions under which it was made. This is some of the most charismatic and insightful music writing I’ve ever read. 

And look. Here’s a playlist I made to accompany the book.

Get your copy here

Stoner (1965)
John Williams

I will never forget the impact and the way I felt when I first discovered this book. John Williams was a writer of such perfection. Published in 1965 to little fanfare, Stoner soon went out of print and slipped under the radar until it was re-published in 2006 to great sensation by the terrific New York Review of Books imprint. It follows the life of William Stoner, a quiet and unmemorable man who comes from a stoic farming family and who goes on to study agriculture at university. But Stoner falls in love with literature, so ditches his farming studies for writing. He goes on to teach literature and establishes a career in academia. We follow his studies, his teaching life, his friendships, and the bitterness of university politics. Stoner doesn’t leave much of an impression on anyone, not even his toxic wife who treats him terribly. But what makes him such a memorable literary character is his absolute dedication to and immersion in writing and teaching. He’s got this quiet strength of character and this love of the written word forms the spiritual core of Stoner. Williams was immersed in the world of literature himself. He taught and wrote, and edited literary journals. Stoner is a powerful love letter to literature and is written with such beautiful depth, clarity and intelligence. It’s plainly written, almost blunt. There are scenes of such immense sadness and beauty that it just sort of hums. I remember reading somewhere that Williams walked in on his typist when she was typing Stoner, to find she had big rolling tears streaming down her face.

Talk to your local indie bookshop about finding you a copy, or check out your library.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016)
Olivia Laing 

With The Lonely City, Olivia Laing elegantly and dexterously dances around and merges reportage, memoir, biography, art and cultural criticism in what is essentially an enquiry into urban loneliness. She looks at connectivity and intimacy, how cities can in fact be lonely, isolating places, and how loneliness doesn't actually require physical solitude. 

And what do so many of us turn to when feeling lost or lonely? Art. So Laing looks at the lives and work of artists (including Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock, and I’m grateful for the introduction to the work of David Wojnarowicz) who weren't necessarily inhabitants of loneliness, but whose work is sharply resonant and hyper alert to the gulfs between people. 

This is the perfect galvanising read, and one (along with all of Laing's non fiction works) that I return to time and again for literary solace. Beautifully pitched, The Lonely City is alluring and brainy. An enquiring and sensitive writer, Laing is such a joy to read. You can read an interview I did with Olivia Laing here.

Get your copy here