The Thousands

It is now the summer break. Keep reminding yourself of that because before too long you will be back in the shit storm you are being forced to take a break from. We think it’s best to make the most of this time by doing a decent amount of reading – it will relax you and fuel you with enough thought and conversation topics to last you the year ahead. But the big question is what to read? Well Allen Lane, here is some recommended reading from ThreeThousand‘s writers that you can spend your book vouchers on…

Eugenia Lim
Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami
I’m a late adopter but am now steadily working my way through Haruki Murakami’s back catalogue. If you don’t mind a bit of Jazz-infused existentialism and characters who (in an apathetic way) love and lose, start with the heartfelt angst of Norwegian Wood.

IQ84, by Haruki Murakami
My biceps are currently getting a work out with IQ84, Murakami’s latest tome. A hybrid epic: think murder, cults, complex family stuff and luuurve. Four overlapping characters and a parallel 1984 under a night sky with two green moons.

Nadia Saccardo
A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
Before you laugh at me you should know that A Game of Thrones (the first book in Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) is not just for fantasy enthusiasts; he’s “telling human stories, in a fantasy world“. And every single one of these books is fucking awesome.

Vanity Fair, edited by Graydon Carter
This is not a book, but I read it cover to cover every month for the corporate corruption stories. The higher they climb, the harder they fall (and in Vanity Fair they usually fall with a prostitute, a plastic surgeon or a martini on a speedboat in Capri).

Lisa Corso
How I Became A Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely
Pete Tarslaw wants three things: fame, financial comfort and to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. How does he achieve this? By setting out to write a best selling novel, using a fail-proof formula he concocted after watching the movements of a Barney’s Best Sellers shelf.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And other Concerns), by Mindy Kaling
Mindy Kaling (that hot indian chick in the US version of The Office) dishes out life lessons and observations (unscientific ones) about the general hoopla comedians-turned-authors generally write about. Except she writes about gender-bending and playing Ben Affleck in the Off-Broadway show Matt & Ben, so naturally her biography is better.

The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh.
Okay, so this book was written in 1948, but its moral still stands: You might be a writer today, but tomorrow you could be working in a funeral parlour… for pets.

Toby Fehily
Life Kills, by Miles Vertigan
There are only 67 sentences in this 111-page collection of keyed-up, multiple-voiced ravings about porn dyslexia, jalapeno madness and hallucination-inducing hypersynthetic omelettes on a plane flight. You can almost see the skid marks before each full stop.

Chris Harrigan
Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
This book is really cool. It’s about a girl called Franny, and a guy called Zooey, and it’s written by a guy called Salinger, who spent the last forty years of his life in a Salinger-esque obscurity penning 15 unpublished novels no will ever read. Great.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, by David Lipsky
I bought this book by mistake. It is not very good.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace
Now this is the shit you get out of bed for. The endless footnoting and Ritalin-laden asides can get a bit head-achy, but DFW was the real deal and wrote the only 62 page review of a dictionary worth reading. It’s the only reason I’m going to get out of bed tomorrow.

Tim Scott
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Yes a basic understanding of the ins and outs of baseball helps but even so this debut novel that follows the tribulations of a small college baseball team is stunning. Harbach’s characters and dialogue have drawn comparisons with Franzen and Foster Wallace.

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt
A quirky and stylish western that follows two hired gunslinging brothers ordered to track down and kill a mysterious man named Herman Kermit Warm. The dirty job has them confronting a witch, a bear, a dead Indian and a gang of murderous fur trappers. This well crafted picaresque is dark and the psychopathic brothers are funny as hell.
(Audio Book)

The Woody Allen collection, by Woody Allen
Woody Allen is not someone you think of as a ‘beach person’ but download this audio book onto your ipod and he becomes a ‘beach’, ‘tram’ and ‘supermarket’ person. It includes Allen’s four books Without Feathers, Side Effects, Mere Anarchy, Getting Even and an interview.

Thomas Blatchford
The Incomplete Tim Key, by Tim Key
The biggest collection yet from the Twitter generation’s answer to Ivor Cutler and a man who does for poetry what LOLcats did for pet ownership. Delightfully bumbling, and only occasionally makes Pam Ayres look like a Booker Prize winner.

How To Be A Woman, by Caitlin Moran
The main reason you’d bother coughing up to get past The Times paywall ends up reminding everyone that feminist polemic can be funny without sounding flippant. Don’t try and use it as an instruction manual though – I’ve tried sneaking into Contours twice since reading it, and nobody’s fallen for that yet.

Lesson Master: Master Of Lessons, by Ben Hutchings
Excellent collection of the flying bug-eyed dwarf pedant’s comic strips, in which he sets out to enforce etiquette and unwritten rules across Australia. Fed up of people talking on their mobile in the library? Hate it when your work colleagues chew their pencil? Cringe when coffee is referred to as ‘Joe’? Get Lesson Master in, he’ll learn ‘em good.

Sam West
Sensitive Creatures, by Mandy Ord
Mandy Ord’s funny little comic in The Lifted Brow about taking her Grandma to dancing classes made me want to read this. In Sensitive Creatures she manages to illustrate all the frustrations, wonders, small victories and flat out weirdness of urban life in such spot-on, sweet natured way, it’s impossible not to like.

Oslo Davis
These are the best drawn books I came across in 2011: Ben Katchor’s excellent The Cardboard Valise, Paul Madonna’s Everything is its own reward, Makoto Wada’s Black & White in Wadaland, and Mandy Ord’s Sensitive Creatures.

Penny Modra
The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson
It’s very hard to find this in bookshops now and I’m not surprised. Everyone secretly wants to find out that they’re a psychopath and Jon Ronson’s book actually helps – investigating the history of the famous checklist-based diagnosis and the fact that a disproportionate percentage of the business and world leader population are psychos. Plus, Jon Ronson. An undiluted mojo source for those who sometimes forget why they try to write.