Books like Three Men in a Boat

This book has shaped the way I look at consensus.

Like Holden standing slightly outside Pencey and watching the people around him without quite belonging, I have often felt most comfortable observing from the edge. In many ways, that distance is part of what made me a writer.

I also love the intimacy of Holden's voice, the sense that he is speaking directly to someone he trusts. I try to keep readers close in my own writing too, even without addressing them directly.

His wandering through Manhattan speaks to the flâneur in me, and I return to the humor, the sensitivity to detail, and the humanity of the book. Even when Holden is haunted by the past, he keeps choosing the present.

Tom Robbins is my favorite writer, and I return to his books again and again.

He once wrote that clocks no more contain time than books contain reality, which comes very close to how I think about both time and fiction. He was smart, funny, loyal to no genre but his own voice, and in a way practiced what he preached, still writing as if he were thirty even in his nineties.

Jitterbug Perfume is Robbins at full strength: playful, sensual, philosophical, and gloriously unwilling to stay in one time period, one tone, or even one sense. The jacket captures that perfectly: it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and does not conclude until nine o'clock tonight, Paris time. I love that sense of centuries collapsing into one immediate moment.

This is one of those rare books that seems completely familiar and still manages to reveal something new every time I return to it.

In a way, I think we are all a little Pooh, a little Eeyore, and a little of the others too. What stays with me most is Pooh himself: he lives almost entirely in the present, with a kind of honey-filled stoicism.

I also love the book's playfulness with language, the expedition to the North Pole, and the sense that the Hundred Acre Wood is both simple and mysterious. That combination has stayed with me for years: language that is rich without being lofty, and an ordinary place that becomes magical simply because someone is paying attention.

I love Walking for its poetry and for the slowness that allows it to sink so deeply into the present.

Thoreau treats walking not as a means of getting somewhere, but almost as an end in itself, and that changes the rhythm of everything around it. That idea stays with me: walking as pure present tense, one step after another. I love the way the book makes room for observation, thought, landscape, and silence without rushing toward a conclusion.

Thoreau has stayed close to me for years; I even chose his line, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” as an epigraph to one of my novels. Sometimes the act itself is enough, and the moment becomes the whole point.

I have always liked the idea of living in a houseboat on the River Thames. This wonderful story simultaneously fed my fantasies and made me realise it might not be as idyllic as I imagined.

The houseboats on Battersea Reach are like a small village–each character is an individual yet integral part of the whole, their fortunes rising and falling with the tide. Through these characters, the book paints a picture of sixties London, swinging yet also unforgiving for those who slip between the cracks. Penelope Fitzgerald lived on a barge in Battersea, and I think much of the story is based on personal experience.

What I particularly liked was the sense of the houseboat dwellers not quite belonging, being offshore in more ways than one. 

In my own writing I’ve recently ventured into the Anglo-Saxon period, so I know how hard it is to conjure the history of these early medieval centuries from the meagre source material that survives. Rory Naismith manages this brilliantly in his highly engaging history of London in the centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest. Naismith’s earlier books are on coins and coinage, but he does not allow his specialism to pull the book off balance. It’s a comparatively short volume, but it provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging capital, and it wears its considerable learning lightly.

Sweet Thames Run Softly is a classic of natural history literature. 

It is reputed to have been read by British servicemen during World War II to remind them of home and peace. It is just as evocative today. It describes a journey down the River Thames in a punt, and it meanders in the same way as the river does. 

The beauty lies in the text and the charm is in the author’s etchings. This is a book that I read time and again, whenever I want inspiration or solace.

We may have visions of what a sustainable society might look like, but how could we possibly get there?

This story imagines a giant music festival which allows free access to those who need care and their carers and designs a care-based mini-society. But they love it so much, no one wants to go home when the music stops. So they don’t!

David Fell brings to this novel all the knowledge he has gained in his years working as a sustainability consultant, and packages it with engaging characters and an exciting plot.

This is the first book in a series that seems—hooray!—never ending.

Novels, novellas, short stories, graphic novels…they’re all built around a wonderful idea: police procedural in a version of the modern world where rivers have goddesses, trees have dryads, and vampires, werewolves, elves, and all the other creatures of folklore and fantasy matter-of-factly exist alongside council estates and the internet. And so have to be policed.

The "Isaacs" (named after Isaac Newton) are that branch of the Old Bill which deals with magic, so its inspectors and constables tend to be witches and wizards. All the books are incredibly inventive and funny. I love them.

Rebecca Stott sets her adventure story in the Roman ruins of early London around 500 AD, and is included in this collection because Stott is, in a sense, creating the first draft of history where none exists with this admirable tale.

It’s of two sisters, Isla and Blue, whose father dies and they must deliver the Sword he forged to the client, King Osric. Listening to the story transported me to the sister’s side as they overcome one obstacle after another. Found myself listening in a dream state — an extraordinary listen that called me to make the exception to include this book in my list.

On the author's website I wanted to learn more about the title and clicked on the tab "Mysterious Black Soil". Reading the entry, I was entranced all over again by this amazing tale. Briefly, when the Romans abandoned Londinium, around 420 AD, the mile-wide… show more.