It also has a list of novels whose sixtieth anniversary is this year. Most I haven't read. (Although The Queen of Zamba is now on my to-read list... Who could resist "an attempt to reconstruct [Edgar Rice Burroughs'] concept logically, without what [de Camp] regarded as Burroughs' biological and technological absurdities"?)
Of the handful I have read, these are my top picks:
5. Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi (RK Narayan): It must be confessed that I remember next to nothing about the plot, but I do remember Narayan's delightful prose. The glimpses of a forgotten world and the insight into rural India are irrelevant when compared to his deft touch and engaging storytelling. Equally engaging, if in a markedly different way, is...
4. Murder Most Royal (Jean Plaidy): Books about Henry VIII are always interesting, at the very least; the man can be accused of many things, but not of having been boring. Royal intrigues, scheming courtiers, doomed queens... What more do you need? Perhaps...
3. Crooked House (Agatha Christie): If it had been Orient Express, it would have been right at the top of the list, but Crooked House, while far more interesting than such (I regret to use the word in conjunction with Christie, but there is no other) disasters as The Big Four and Endless Night, is not of quite the same calibre as her best work... so much so that despite being virulently opposed to depressing books, I have to give the next spot to...
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell): I resisted reading this for years after I read Animal Farm, but it's one of those things that you eventually have to do. Normally I'd never recommend a book that makes you shiver every time you think of motion-capture cameras at traffic lights, but the very fact that it does make you shiver is a sign of Orwell's genius. This would be at Number One, were it not for...
1. The Mating Season (PG Wodehouse): Practically nothing could be a better read for a winter's day - or for that matter a summer's day, or any other kind of day - than Jeeves-and-Bertie chaos, with aunts, impostors, and Madeline Bassett's theories on what happens when a fairy sneezes (and, as a bonus, her views on Mervyn Keene, Clubman).
Incidentally, this is also (possibly) the four-hundredth anniversary year of Cymbeline (or Pericles, or perhaps both). Scholars may disagree.
Happy reading!
