As the world settles into self-isolation, it should come as no surprise that book sales have surged. Dusty reading piles have finally been demolished, and now we're all on the hunt for new recommendations.
That's why, as part of our new 'Shelfie' series, we've decided to ask our favourite celebrity friends for a peek at their collection. Think of it as a very cerebral version of Cribs. This week, 'Kill Your Friends' author John Niven guides us through the well-worn books that continue to inspire him.
Martin Amis has been my favourite British novelist since I was at school, when I read 'Money' in sixth form. But it’s only as I’ve gotten into, ah, advancing years that I’ve really got to grips with a lot of his father’s work. Obviously I knew 'Lucky Jim' from university and remember finding it a bit dated when I read it in the late 80s, some 30 years after it was published. But reading his later work, like 'Stanley and the Women', when you’re older, after you’ve been through divorce and disappointment and all that stuff, has been a real eye-opener. And a reminder that literature is not static, that books, and writers, change with you. Although this novel is undoubtedly what we’d now call ‘problematic.'
'Powerhouse: CAA. James Andrew Miller' is an oral history about the formation and rise to power of Creative Artists Agency, the agency group set up by Mike Ovitz in the 1970s. I’m kind of addicted to the oral history genre in general and Hollywood books in particular. In fact, if my bookshelves were at all better organised I could probably have taken a photograph of a couple of yards’ worth of such books. But, as you can see, there’s no method here whatsoever. Fiction rubs up against non-fiction, genre cross-pollinates with genre and so on. I saw David Nichols was doing a big reordering of his bookshelves on Twitter the other day and I must have contemplated a similar exercise myself for all of, oh, three or four minutes before I made a pitcher of martinis and ranted about not being able to find some book I was after.
waterstone Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency (Paperback)
waterstone Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency (Paperback)
There’s a fair bit of Bukowski on this shelf, and also James Ellroy. I’ve loved Ellroy since the early 90s and we share a UK editor, who I always remorselessly pump for anecdotes after Ellroy’s been in London. We were meant to have dinner once and it got cancelled at the last minute. Which was probably a good thing on balance. It spared me doing the middle-aged fanboy thing – the most undignified of all sights. With Bukowski, like many people I read him feverishly when I was younger and then didn’t touch his books for a long time. A bit like you do with Kerouac. But, on a whim, I picked up 'Ham on Rye' when I was in Book Soup in LA earlier this year (hence the two copies you’re seeing here) and it’s stood up remarkably well. Unlike Kerouac, who I’d need that pitcher of martinis to read these days.
Just along from the Bukowski you can see my copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Full disclosure: this is a book I have never been able to make a dent in. Like an undergraduate with Finnegans Wake, I make a half-hearted attempt to do so every other year. Clearly I am not alone in this.
And finally – and not pictured – is my own new novel, 'The F*ck It List'. Yes, I finally reached peak me in publishing a book whose very title cannot be spoken on radio or TV. The title – as people on tv and radio would point out – is a play on the notion of The Bucket List. Frank Brill is a 60-year-old former newspaper editor who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Rather than deciding to go and swim with dolphins or whatever the fuck, Frank goes on a revenge killing spree. It’s set in 2026, in an America that has seen eight years of Donald Trump and is now halfway through Ivanka’s first term in the Whitehouse. When I began the novel over two years ago, early in Trump’s first term, with the Mueller report ongoing, this seemed like a mildly outlandish satirical proposition. Today? Not so much.
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