August Beach Reads

Don’t let your iPhones overheat in the sun. Read a book instead. 

BY

MARCO ROTH,

DAVID MIKICS,

AND

PARK MACDOUGALD

AUGUST 14, 2023

MARCO ROTH

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

How does Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel—part satire, part fable—about an all-American goy losing and finding himself in a mostly magical Africa hold up? Bellow’s tribal princes, queens, and advisers would not be out of place in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Wakanda, nor, for that matter, at Leo Strauss’ University of Chicago seminars on Machiavelli and humanism. Crucially, for Bellow, the path to full humanity leads through a series of vivid, unsparing encounters with various animals: cows, frogs, lions, pigs. Henderson’s rambling story of an old carnival bear and a roller coaster—possibly the truest details in the novel apart from Bellow’s descriptions of flying over Egypt—crowns the book with a devastating coda.

Robert McCrum / All Time Top 10

 

Joseph Conrad

All Time Top 10

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / An introduction by Robert McCrum

Book Review

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility.

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

Emily Brontë’s windswept masterpiece is notable not just for its wild beauty but for its daring reinvention of the novel form itself.

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

Wise, funny and gripping, Melville’s epic work continues to cast a long shadow over American literature.

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions.

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.

043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.

046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.

050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.

You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

THE GUARDIAN

Book Review 043 / The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

 

The Rainbow 

by D. H. Lawrence

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 43 / The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

John Pistelli
28 May 2022

You can’t read The Rainbow with a pencil in hand. You can’t highlight sentences on paper or onscreen. There’s just too much of it, and it’s constantly in motion.

I took a creative writing class in high school. The teacher told us to write about an experience. The next day we had to go around the circle and read what we’d written aloud. The class-clown stoner, amid much giggling, read out some stream-of-consciousness gibberish. He had fallen into the kind of displaced stern-mother-and-wayward-son relation to the instructor that is one of the possible high-school teacher-student bonds, so Ms. K. scolded him that he had not written about an experience. “It’s an ongoing experience,” he backtalked. It would have been a good defense—in theory, it’s a great defense—if what he’d written had been any good. It’s also the motto of modernism. It’s also what Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow is: an ongoing experience, in service to a new vision of life, love, sex, and the universe. The book just keeps coming at you in a torrent of language, all sorts of language, though not in the montage Ulysses style, just an aggressive fusion of the naturalistic, the Biblical, and the psychological. Critics like to quote more than one letter in which Lawrence described the novel as written in a foreign language or as something he found himself translating, which is why much of it is, at least to me, so blurred. For all the experience, there aren’t enough images, not enough real scenes.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence / Chapter One

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D. H. Lawrence

Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction

Chapter One

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

 

Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction

From Bram Stoker to Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist selects the best writing about a subject 'central to much of our lives and indeed life itself'

Rowan Somerville
Wed 15 Dec 2010 12.21 GMT

Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her, described by the Economist as "deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past has become our present. A summer read to be kept – and visited in the dark days of winter..." Last month, the novel followed authors including John Updike and Norman Mailer in winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award.

"Most adults are interested in sex. I am. My father was, and said as much to me when he was 92. I suspect that you are too. You're reading this after all. Being so central to much of our lives and indeed life itself, it is a valid and important topic for fiction.

"The challenge of writing about sex is to evoke the physicality, the yearning, the counterpoint between magnificent operatic grandiosity and ludicrous bestial grunting – without resorting to cliché. As the American author Elizabeth Benedict wrote: 'A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.' As an enthusiastic reader and a writer too, my opinion is that it doesn't matter how weird things get as long as it remains original and feels authentic.

"Some of the sex in the books below works as a device for revealing the state of society, some is a device for characterisation; a way of revealing truths about characters that they themselves may not be able to see – but most of it is just about desire, lust and sex itself."

10. Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003)

Strange perhaps to begin this list with a book I really dislike – but churlish I feel to leave it out when it is such a reflection of contemporary views. Bleak, cold and mechanical, it's sex in a world without spirit with a faint possibility of redemption through heartless shagging.

9. The Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)

A male fantasy of total female submission. It was hugely popular but also despised for its objectification of woman – the protagonist is called "O" – no more than a letter, a zero, an orifice. Half a century later it is discovered to be the work of a woman, Anne Desclos, who wrote not for publication but for the pleasure of her lover. It's fascinating: erotic, intense, in parts repellent, frequently pornographic and ultimately self-annihilating.

8. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)

Aficionados the world over will laugh at my tentative and no doubt outdated steps into fiction about gay sex, but as a (so far) straight man this was my introduction. Beautiful language, powerful story; saucy too if you can let yourself go.

7. Thongs by Alexander Trocchi (1955)

I bought this because it was meant to be disgusting and then found it to be much more than that. I was disappointed and later inspired – although it is pretty grubby. It was published by the Olympia Press – a Parisian publishing company specialising in erotica and the avant-garde. Five of the 10 books on this list were first published by this extraordinary house along with a host of classics such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer and The Ginger Man .

6. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.

5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928)

Has to go in. Since everything's already been said about this, let's hear from a great poet: "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/ And The Beatles' first LP." (Philip Larkin "Annus Mirabilis")

4. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)

Short stories retelling traditional tales and uncovering the sexual politics within. Her sentences reclaim and radicalise patriarchal language: "her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks". Funny, original, and brilliant.

3. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)

Unnerving, delicious, completely wrong, provocative, unbridled, surreal, graphically erotic, boundless and imaginative, indulgent and beautiful. What more can I say?

2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)

A work of art by our greatest living writer. The 19th century seen through a fiercely modern cinematic lens. Faber tears the gauze and the drawers off Victorian England with his skilful prose and virtuoso structure. Behold the wonderful heroine Sugar – complex, flaky of skin, keen of mind – ready to do what no one else will. A big book in every sense. Essential.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that is an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.

THE GUARDIAN

Covers / DH Lawrence / The Rainbow

THE RAINBOW

by DH Lawrence

Covers

The 100 best novels / No 43 / The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915) 

The Short, Controversial Life of D. H. Lawrence