I’m not going to say much here.
This is – today – a list of my top 25 books ever.
- Puckoon by Spike Milligan
2. Oh! The Places You’ll Go by Dr Seuss
3. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriela Garcia Marquez
4. The Choir Boys by Joseph Wambaugh
5. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
6. The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W E Bowman
7. Team of Rivals by Doris Kerins Goodwin
8. At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien
9. An tOileanach leTomás Ó Criomhthain
10. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
11. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
12. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham - Hard Times by Charles Dickens
14. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
15. Animal Farm by George Orwell,
16. The Devil’s in the Drum by John Lucy
17. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
18. Fiche Blian ag Fás le Muiris Ó Súileabháin
19. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
20. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
21. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
22. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
25. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Can’t explain why I love these more than others. Truth is, if I did the list next week it might be different.
Puckoon always cheers me up. I have given away more copies of Oh! The Places You’ll Go than any other book. It is so real, so honest and so positive it’s a great gift for people making a change in their lives.
Three Men in a Boat and the lesser known Ascent of Rum Doodle both make me smile every time.
So. What are your favourites?
Paddy's World 
The Ginger Man
J P Donleavy
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You’re dead right!
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Hi Paddy,
Here are a few I would always buy for a euro or two in the charity shops (oh happy days!) to give away at random, because I loved them so much:
The Hare With Amber Eyes – Edm. de Waal;
Any Human Heart – William Boyd;
Any of the early novels by Michael Connolly – Harry Bosch or not;
The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale;
The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills, plus his later books.
My favourite Wodehouse was The Mating Game – so many times I could not read on because I was shaking with laughter. But really, anything.
Of the classics (the Penguin variety):
Xenophon – the Anabasis or March of the Ten Thousand, or whatever title it’s now given – I read this as a schoolboy and it is impossible to forget.
Thucydides – The Peleponessian War. I brought this on a camping holiday with my brothers because I thought it would force me to read some classics. It was so gripping they had to threaten to collapse the tent to get me to move.
Bernal Diaz – The Conquest of New Spain – again an eye-witness tale of true-life adventure in a new world, almost impossible to put down.
That should keep most of us going until end of May.
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Just finished Above Average at Games – a compilation of Wodehouse writing about sport. Brilliant, of course. Hope you’re good Martin!
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