Books like You Only Live Once — picked by fans

I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.

And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.

Make sure to find a first-class translation!

I first read this book exactly 50 years ago, back in 1974, when I was 26. Ever since then, I have reread Jaroslav Hašek's masterpiece every single year, always in February. It is the gloomiest month of the year in Europe when our tonus is at its lowest, and we desperately need something to cheer us up.

The hilarious story of the good soldier is precisely that “injection” of optimism, serenity, élan vital that helps me make it through the last winter months till the arrival of the Spring. Although I already know by heart many passages from Svejk, I still laugh aloud while reading them—reading about the instinctive wisdom of an ordinary, small Czech man trying to comically outsmart the demonic forces of History…

I loved this book because it proved that you can think a book is crap one day, and absolutely love it the next*. 

I was twenty-something and about to have an impacted wisdom tooth chiseled out and wanted a book for my convalescence. It had a great cover, so I flipped open to the first page and read the opening line—something like, “Amoebas don’t have bones…”.

Whoever wrote this book was of dubious sanity, so I bought it and had the wisdom tooth removed, which evidently actually removed the wisdom needed to appreciate the writing. Time passed, and I gave the book another try—evidently the wisdom had returned because what had once been chaotic and confusing and stupid was now delightfully random and effortlessly insightful, and really, really fun.

I loved this book.

* Actually, it wasn’t the next day; it was actually about a year or so later.

This one got me because, in contrast to the first 3 books, the dubious sanity wasn’t apparent at first; it was in stealth mode (like it is in the rest of us) and slowly revealed itself through the characters in a captivating and compelling demolition derby of old money privilege, no money envy, tennis glory days, hockey knuckles, and Hollywood sleaze. It’s an exceptionally good book by an exceptionally masterful writer that nobody’s ever heard of, at least I hadn’t.

One measure of a book (a physical book) is a count of how many pages have been dog-eared by the reader when they reach the last page. By this measure, this book is an exceptionally good book, since it yields not only an abundance of dog-eared pages but also numerous double-dog-eared pages—a crystalline-perfect character touch, a simple but poetic line of dialogue, a haunting description of a jawline, a blustering… show more.

Who knew that the emperor Nero appointed an Advisor on Tastefulness, who also penned a bawdy and gritty novel about the adventures of several friends in the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD? Fairly few, and the even more surprising fact is that hundreds of pages of his text survive today. You can still read either in Latin or in English translation about two young men proposing to fight for the affections of the youth Giton and you can join them all in a visit to an archetypal Roman brothel. There is nothing else remaining that provides a more direct and authentic insight into daily experiences and relationships in ancient Rome.

The animal is a number of racehorses. The human is a collection of owners, trainers, jockeys, and more, yielding a comprehensive look at human and animal behavior in the horse racing industry. A strong, intimate novel. I used to ride but never very well, and I’ve always wondered what a horse’s “thoughts” involved. Author Smiley gave me a feel for that as she applied her own assumptions to one horse in particular.  

This was one of the first books I read at university. I admired Marie Munkara’s gruff voice and the way she delicately balanced satirical humour and dark truths.

Juxtaposing the voices of colonial guards and officers with 16-year-old Aboriginal mother, Sugar, lends this novel a messy complexity which is always compelling.

At the beginning, I found it easy to mock and deride the white colonial officers: the overtly racist Drew, the well-meaning but exploitative Ralphie, the bumbling, inadequate Hump with his mistaken ambitions of grandeur. I thought I’d figured it all out, that I’d grasped all of Munkara’s meaning. 

But as Sugar’s fate is revealed, and more significantly, she recognises the inevitability of her downfall, I was humbled. Munkara’s book taught me to look beyond the seemingly obvious characters and literary devices to the nuance within. 

For any long-haul flight, Tom Sharpe is one of my go-to authors; he encapsulates British wit at its finest. Of the many that I’ve read, I probably feel the greatest connection to Porterhouse Blue. Having experienced Oxbridge undergraduate life for myself, this book revives so many memories. The main characters are so beautifully crafted and relatable. The resemblance of lead character Skullion to a porter at my old college is uncanny. As for Zipser the undergrad... well, having also been ‘romantically frustrated’ in my own college days, I have great empathy for him... including his fixation for the buxom bedder on his staircase.  

Told as a series of movie reviews, A Short Film About Disappointment unfurls its dystopia gradually. A hacker attack kicks off a global multi-decade economic depression, and to prevent this from ever happening again the Internet is abolished and replaced with the “Betternet,” a neutered and highly censored version of the Internet. Personal screens are also banned in this nanny state, leading to a robust cinema culture that the unread reviewer wants to contribute to with a dense art film of his own. The hilarious capsule descriptions of eighty (fictional) films serve as an oblique way of introducing the world, while the numerous tangents of the writer “Noah Body” tell a personal story of love, filmmaking, and a literal haunting by an ex-friend.

Did you remember when Jill Peel won an Oscar in 1950s Hollywood, and then destroyed her career by standing up to sexist producers? Then past her prime, she attempted a creative comeback by embarking on her directorial debut? Of course not! It’s all fiction, of course. But with McMurtry at the helm, you can’t help but mistake it for real life. One of my all-time favorite writers, the talented Texan manages to capture Hollywood, sexism, and complex people in an honest way. If you’re a fan of the everyday situational humor exuding in his works like Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this still very relevant look at aging and gender in the motion picture industry.