100 Books Like Death in the Afternoon

When I was young and ambitious and dreamed about politics, when I had studied Greek philosophy and ancient history in graduate school, the life of T.E.Lawrence–Lawrence of Arabia as he became known–a young Englishman who had never been in a battle before led the Arab Revolt which helped bring an end to the First World War, made everything seem possible.

Lawrence had his secrets, but some of them he shared. Two of them seemed to my young imagination everything that was needed. Speaking like Odysseus was one of them, which meant tailoring what you say to the audience you have. The other was to make the strength of your opponent his fatal weakness.

I did not realize until much later that the most important thing I learned from T.E. Lawrence was that what is best remembered is what is written, like this book, with clarity and passion.

At age 15, I was captivated by Ernest Hemingway and his depiction of Paris in the 1920s. This book today reignites the enchantment of those years. Hemingway's profound influence shaped my aspirations as a writer. Through his eyes, I can vividly see Paris's cafés, salons, and vibrant social scenes, which ultimately became the backdrop of my dreams.

This book, rich with lovemaking, drinking, writing, betting at the track, and the bohemian lifestyle of so many young artists in Paris, reawakens my desire to immerse myself in that world. Hemingway's narrative voice and his novels continue to speak to me in a language that feels intimately mine, reminding me of the undying impact of his work on my life and aspirations.

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

I loved the voice of this book–it’s the voice of Stephen King, clever, yes, and a brilliant novelist, of course, but also absolutely down-to-earth. King is a perfectionist, continually going back through his writing to hone it–a useful reminder to all of us not to be satisfied with a first or second draft.

The book shows how, in the best writing, both dialogue and plot arise out of character. And I particularly valued his emphasis on cutting, cutting, cutting–dialogue and everything else. He’s made me do that more than ever!

I cannot remember in which of his many short stories I read it, but the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges put into the mouth of one of his inimitable characters a line that has never left me: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Borges was the master of the unexpected, describing situations no one could have foreseen. I have read everything he wrote and read his stories over and over again. 

The ones I like best deal with bravery and cowardice but also with time and how time can change what we think happened in the past out of all recognition. In The Other Death, a man who ran away during a great battle, dying forty years later of natural causes, describes in his delirium how he had fought bravely.

Those who heard him provide this first-hand account to the… show more.

Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.

Okay. Fine. Maybe I only think this book is about loss because I know that, in later books, the same Glass family suffers losses and this sets the stage. But this is a story about a promise that is never realized and a relationship that is becoming progressively distant—and, in it, there is a sense of being lost if not having experienced a loss, specifically. In it, Buddy Glass takes Army leave to attend his brother’s wedding, but his brother never shows up. Somehow, Buddy winds up stuck in a limo with a group of disgruntled guests from whom he tries to hide his identity. In his sense of isolation, but also his awareness of the situation’s absurdity, we find humor and also sadness.

My father, who had spent three years at sea before going to college, used to tell me stories of adventures in the Pacific when I was a small boy, which is perhaps the reason I was drawn to Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad’s story of a failed romantic, a hero in all his youthful dreams who became notorious as a coward and then known everywhere as the truly heroic Lord Jim. 

The story of living with, and then overcoming, my own cowardice was not some made-up tale of the past for me; it was, and it remains, a reminder of things I should have done and did not and what, if anything, I did later to make things right.

Paul Preston needs no introduction to readers of contemporary Spanish history. He embodies the term ‘Hispanist’ and has been writing about the country for decades, with a focus on the Spanish Civil War. Preston tells the gripping tale of those who fought to tell the story, often at risk to their own lives, namely the foreign correspondents who, in reporting the war, made every effort to reveal the truth. Preston catches this column-inch internationalism with brilliance in his survey of such notables as Ernest Hemingway and Henry Buckley. The book is absorbing, frequently moving, and sprinkled with humour. It fills a crucial gap in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War.

If the First World War was the brooding background to 1930s Britain, the Spanish Civil War was the tragic conflict at its centre. Thousands of British volunteers went to Spain to fight, overwhelmingly on the Republican side. Meanwhile, the British government’s dogged adherence to a non-intervention agreement was slowly starving the Republicans of military aid.

I rate Preston’s account of the war because he shows how the brutal civil conflict became a proxy battleground for international forces of right and left while Britain clung to non-intervention. London was in a genuine bind over Spain but ended up adopting a position that paved the way for the appeasement of Hitler, a policy many Britons saw as profoundly dishonest.