Books like Amsterdam — picked by fans

Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels are as much about music as they are about the navy.

Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin meet at a chamber music concert in the opening pages of this first novel in the series. The scene prefigures the way they will one day play duets at sea on their cello and violin.

I love how the opening scene uses music to establish their contrasting personalities. Jack, who is all enthusiasm, can’t help himself but beat time to Locatelli’s String Quartet in C Major. Stephen insults Jack by telling him he is ruining the concert; if he’s going to beat the measure, he should at least not rush. What could have led to a duel ends in a lifetime of friendship.

The sardonic humor is what grabbed me first. But as I gleefully zipped through this story of a lesbian’s coming of age in a repressive Pentecostal church, the author was quietly raising the stakes. She delivers profound observations of how family expectations disproportionately damage queer people. Religion always complicates such stories.

As a gay man who grew up Catholic, I was entranced by how the book deals with faith. When the protagonist starts to understand her own sexual impulses, the power and depth of human emotion also dawn on her. Her religion and family don’t have satisfying answers, and so she creates her own kind of faith. Reading how she does it was incredibly moving for me. 

Julian Barnes dramatizes the tortured inner life of the Soviet Union’s greatest composer.

Dmitri Shostakovich was by all accounts a nervous wreck: a twitching, blinking, sweating mess. He lived in the glare of Stalin himself as the most prominent Russian composer in the 1930s and ‘40s, during the Great Terror.

What I return to is the way Barnes takes us inside Shostakovich’s mind as he tried to balance writing music with life-or-death politics. Some of the compromises he made, like denouncing Igor Stravinsky’s modern compositions, haunted him. "He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life."

If Jane Austen was writing in the twentieth century, she’d be Barbara Pym!

There is so much sly, gentle humour in this story of a respectable thirty-something vicar’s daughter living in London in the fifties. Her life revolves around her church and work, and when a glamorous married couple moves into the flat upstairs, everything changes.

I’ve read this book so many times, and it has never failed to delight me. Great characterisation, a narrative that moves along at a cracking pace, and several potential suitors for the protagonist’s hand. Also, the book contains some of my favourite jokes around bird poo, fawn underwear, and badly made tea. Even though I’ve read and reread it, I always hate to get to the last chapter and finish it again.

This novel explores what it means to leave music behind.

August Blue follows a concert pianist who walks off the stage, mid-performance, then follows her doppelganger across Europe. As she moves further from her artistic career, music becomes a memory. 

I admire the dream-like nature of the story, and the way Deborah Levy manages to capture in prose the idea of a sound heard, remembered, and slowly forgotten, as in this passage: "There were weeks when I played fragments of my score through the night, which is when I felt most in communion with [her]. I projected myself into her and she became music."

This novella explores the idea of the musical earworm.

The narrator’s wife is an accomplished pianist; she and a violinist begin performing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata together, which serves as a motif and a proxy for adultery. The protagonist catches them together and commits an unforgivable act of violence.

It is rare in literature to portray the way music can soundtrack our lives—yet that is how many of us experience music, rather than seated in a concert hall on a Saturday evening. Tolstoy’s novella shows how a single piece of music can take on the repetitive, hallucinatory sheen of madness.

Blind Justice, set in 1768, is the first of Bruce Alexander’s 11 Sir John Fielding mysteries. Its hero is the famous blind magistrate of London’s Bow Street Court; its narrator is thirteen-year-old Jeremy Proctor, whom Fielding’s wisdom has saved from an unjust accusation of theft. The pair investigate the death of Sir Richard Goodhope, who has been discovered shot in his library, locked from the inside. Sir John assumes suicide, but Jeremy’s observation of a detail that the magistrate could not see suggests murder. Proof of murder involves following Goodhope’s history through London’s streets, gambling houses, coffee houses, and great houses—to Drury Lane theater and Newgate—in a compelling portrait of eighteenth-century London.

Peter Ackroyd has written several wonderful books about London, the Thames, and aspects of English life, but this six-volume series (the last to come in 2023) is the best and most comprehensive I’ve found. It’s a delightful trip through history, not only covering the politics of the times but giving insight into the daily lives of people from one era to the next, how towns became cities, infrastructure and the system of government developed. The page counts are daunting, but don’t be dissuaded—nobody can make history come alive better than Ackroyd.

This novel represents a sharp turn for me. Until I snapped up Zero History in an airport bookstore many years ago, the science fiction I’d read seemed like dry, intellectual exercises. The characters didn’t have depth. They never made me laugh (or cry). But Zero History unleashed a passion in me for speculative fiction, and eventually, it turned my own writing in that direction as well. To this day, it’s one of my all-time favorite novels. While it’s the third book in a William Gibson trilogy, it is entirely complete on its own. There’s a pop culture, cool vibe about it as the story taps into the lives of three people with unusual gifts – which a global marketing magnate dearly wants to use in various ways.

Captain Gronow shed some light on the darker aspects of the Regency period, which was a time before law enforcement as we know it. But it wasn’t all bad—the Bow Street Runners were the start of a new era of policing. I was fascinated by the story of how these first detectives came to be and how much truth was behind the myth, especially since the myth has become a popular one for fiction writers in recent years.