Neil Pearson: My Six Best Books
ACTOR Neil Pearson is a bibliophile and the author of Obelisk: A History Of Jack Kahane And The Obelisk Press. He is also on the judging panel for the 2009 Costa Book Awards.
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
Penguin, £8.99
A young girl has an affair with a married industrialist and as social outcasts they begin a new life in New York. As her career soars from chorus girl to Broadway star his goes into terminal decline. You’d be forgiven for thinking Dreiser was influenced by A Star Is Born but Sister Carrie was written in 1900.
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
Vintage, £6.99
Like Orson Welles, Hemingway never equalled the beginning of his career except here. A collection of essays about the time he spent in the Paris of the Twenties, the book sighs with love for the city, for the people he knew there and heartbreakingly for the person he used to be. Hemingway committed suicide before the book was published.
Death of a Hero
by Rchard Aldington
Out of print
Gloriously splenetic First World War novel of the lions-led-by-donkeys school and the equal of anything by Graves, Remarque or the war poets. A blistering tripartite rant against war, the complacency of an older generation and the blithe indifference of pampered non-combatants.
The Young And Evil
by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler
Out of print
A gay novel written before the genre of gay literature existed and another book which deserves to be far better known than it is. First published by a tiny Paris imprint in 1933, written in a collage-like modernist style and set in the drag balls and speakeasies of Twenties New York, it’s vivid and refreshingly joyful.
Hangover Square
by Patrick Hamilton
Penguin, £9.99
Set in the seedy, smoky pubs and boarding houses of the Thirties and featuring George Bone, the most sympathetic psychopath in literature: massively built, painfully shy, kind-hearted but shamelessly exploited by almost every other character in the novel. Never has a book’s love interest been more deserving of a slow and painful death. A masterpiece.
Coming Up For Air
by George Orwell
Penguin, £9.99
The best novel by the 20th century’s greatest essayist. A moving lament for times gone by and worlds lost, told in Orwell’s trademark conversational style. Like having the most interesting man in the world come and sit on the barstool next to yours.