An Alternative to the Guardian’s List of 25 Books to Read Before We Turn 25

The Guardian has consulted some “leading authors” to select 25 books that will get children reading again instead of screening. Sam Leith, who is the ringleader, adds: “Of course, for every book that appears on this list there are many dozens more that could, or should, have been here.” Well, that’s a relief, as the list was pretty terrible.

There seems to be a hint that here we have one per year and that the most babyish books come first. Anyhow, this is the Guardian list. You should consult the original to see the full justifications. Here I add my own annotations to the list.

1. Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Fair enough. Though my eldest son’s favourite say-the-word book was Hug!
2. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. Nope.
3. Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss. A classic. Remarkable for the sketch of folly in the shape of the “noodle-eating poodle”: my term-of-abuse of choice for any abject follower of any sort of political fashions, including COVID-19. Someone one wants to hit across the head with a paddle in a puddle in a bottle…
4. Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Not too bad.
5. Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel. Never heard of it.
6. Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. I read this to my youngest son and we greatly enjoyed it. So that’s two so far.
7. Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. Never heard of it.
8. Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. Never heard of it.
9. Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson. Never heard of it. Sounds like a drunken pro-Palestinian song.

The last line of this book is, apparently, “Children must lead big lives… if it is in them to do so”, which would make me ironise if I read this to a child. “And if it isn’t in them to do it, darling, then they can lead small lives, if they want.” Stare at child with blank benignity.

10. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Thank God for that.
11. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. Never heard of it. Steampunk. Heard of him though. Oh dear.
12. The Owl Service by Alan Garner. Never heard of it. Sexual tension for 12 year olds. Steady on, Leith.
13. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend. The release of that sexual tension, I suppose. I remember this book very well. It seemed to be a major part of Government/BBC and comprehensive school library propaganda in the 1980s. What was the Government up to, encouraging us to dwell on these years and make them into an entire life instead of leaving them behind? Better than Catcher in the Rye, says Leith, but David Copperfield, alluded to by Holden Caulfield, is better than either. And Steerforth had no use for Clearasil.
14. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman. Never heard of it.
15. A Hand Full of Stars by Rafik Schami. Never heard of it. “A window into the lives of young people living under repressive regimes”, declares the Guardian. Let’s move on.
16. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. No. And Crow was rubbish too.
17. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. “Nobody who reads Never Let Me Go will soon forget it”, we are told, and the funny thing is I can’t remember if I have read it or not. Now I feel a bit like Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. [Welsh accent]: Oh, well.
18. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Story about slavery. Well, I suppose this is the Guardian.
19. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Never read it. Better than Catch-22? Or I, Robot? Or the Beano?
20. The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet. Married woman has an affair with a young man. Never heard of it. Read Constant’s Adolphe instead.
21. Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. I confess that my monocle flew out when I read this. “Time present and time past…” I like bits of it. I cannot see why a young person would read this old-age lament of Tom’s, unless asked by a teacher to do so for an exam. I’d say read Eliot’s essays instead. Kids pretend to like Eliot’s Lloyd-Webbery cats, but it is only silly adults who like ‘em.
22. Emma by Jane Austen. Bloody hell, Leith is suddenly piling on the Eng. Lit., isn’t he? Irony, oh yes.
23. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. All Leith’s good work is undermined by this reversal. In fact let me quote him:

Atwood’s 1985 novel about the cruelty of a Christian fundamentalist patriarchy has become ever more essential over time. This story imagines a world in which a military theocracy abolishes women’s rights to own property, read or write and removes their reproductive autonomy altogether. It’s tense and exciting – and it teaches a moral lesson that shouldn’t any more be needed, but apparently is.

Leith doesn’t explain, but perhaps even a few days away from the Spectator to write something for the Guardian addles his brains a bit (or makes the hypocrisy come naturally).

24. White Noise by Don DeLillo. Never read it. Wouldn’t read it. American tosh. An American woman PhD student in Cambridge was reading it near me in 2000 and it looked like rubbish then and it would look like double rubbish now. Just read Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic again instead.
25. Middlemarch by George Eliot. “Time to read probably the most grown-up novel in the language and certainly one of the best.” Well. Pass. I read it. Not as good as Disraeli’s Coningsby. Poor old Casaubon. Dim little Will. As for “grown-up novel” I don’t think that there is such a thing. Novels are for young people: to write and to read. Most old novelists are condemned by their success, and a bit of pride, to try to keep writing novels. I think anyone over 30 who still reads novels habitually, especially “grown-up” ones, has never matured beyond a certain point.

Now Leith is not solely responsible for this list. He consulted Michael Rosen, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Katherine Rundell, Nicolette Jones, Jacqueline Wilson and the former children’s Laureate, if he or she is not one of those already named. But where is Narnia, where is Roald Dahl, where is Alice in Wonderland, where is, I don’t know, The Owl and the Pussycat? And I am not even trying very hard. No Lord of the bloody Rings?

And what is there for boys? The list sounds like a sort of wet, dismaying way of raising a neurotic girl, who’ll dye Blue, spray Orange and vote Green on every occasion. So here is my alternative list, a sort of Frankie-Boyle-against-the-Queen sort of list, except I imagine the Queen would have preferred my list, while Frankie Boyle would probably prefer the Guardian’s. I’ll start with the three from the Guardian list that I’ll let through.

1. Fox in Socks. Though I am also fond of the misanthropic nature of the fellow who does not like Sam-I-Am.
2. Just So Stories.
3. Treasure Island. Everyone used to like Robinson Crusoe as their seafaring lost-boy classic but it is very hard to read now. I think I read it in my late 30s. So Treasure Island it is. Peter Pan is no good and Lord of the Flies is too nasty and forgetful.
4. The Iliad in some form or other, whether abridged, cartooned or Faglised.
5. Asterix in Britain.
6. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
7. The Three Musketeers. All of these are essential. Asterix for self-mockery and spirit, Sherlock Holmes for a celebration of eccentricity and skill and the Musketeers for exuberance and a bit of history: perhaps Milady was the first heroine I found perplexing and wonderful. Perhaps, come to think of it, Richelieu was the first politician I saw depicted (apart from Caesar in Asterix).
8. The Pickwick Papers. The Fat Boy. The fighting cab driver in the first chapter. Sam. Mr Weller and the difference between his and his son’s Cockney. The funny conversation with Count Smorltork about the nature of politics. Tracy Tupman, etc.
9. And, damn it, we need some non-fiction. Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Yes, indeed, Leith, how about that for grown-up? Everyone should read bits of Heraclitus. Everyone.
10. Boswell, Life of Johnson. Teaches you how to talk for victory, how to kick stones to refute silly arguments and how to throw snails into the gardens of your enemies.
11. Shakespeare, for God’s sake, The Collected Works in some form or other.
12. Hobbes, Leviathan. Own it. Read about it. Read bits of it, from back to front. Read the opening. Read the definitions of laughter, vainglory, etc. A very strange book. Has the great line: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”
13. Hang on, I am rushing ahead into profundity. Let’s go back a bit and have Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. An exquisitely sadistic comedy of war.
14. Decline and Fall, Waugh, not Gibbon.
15. Instead of Roman history, read anything by Steven Runciman: for instance The Fall of Constantinople.
16. Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. The best of his books. About bullfights. Read it in unbearably hot weather or abroad.
17. Something terrible and tragic by Turgenev: or Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley: or, hell’s bells, Michael Arlen’s Green Hat: anything with a deathlike and to-die-for heroine: absolutely essential for the sentimental education of a young man.
18. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming. Keeps it simple.
19. The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse. Yes, where was Wodehouse in the original list?
20. Mr Noon by D.H. Lawrence. Bet you didn’t think I’d pick that one. The best depiction of a kiss in all literature. And amusing to boot.
21. The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Historical sensibility meets a real contemporary problem. Knocks all of Len Deighton / John le Carré into a cocked hat too.
22. Hegel’s Philosophy of History. At some point you must read this book. Imposing, because of the imposition of a pattern on all history.
23. I and Thou by Martin Buber. Profound. If you don’t like meditation and theology then, instead, for equivalent profundity on another scale, how about Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, which is quite possibly the greatest and most staggering vision of the future ever attempted by the imagination of man?
24. The Gospel of John.
25. Plato’s Parmenides. The most astonishing philosophical work ever written. As relentless as the Hammerklavier and 10 times as exhausting.

That’s more like it. I have ignored poetry and if you want any don’t bother with Four Quartets: just read Macaulay’s Horatius from The Lays of Ancient Rome instead. Anyhow, the Guardian list was woeful. Make your own list. But nothing, please, about slavery or Syria. Nothing about how children should live “big lives”, if they can, which sounds like a curse. Read plenty of Chesterton. Read Orwell’s 1984 if you want, but school makes you read that anyway. Read anything that doesn’t remind you of AI. Read a bit of everything: a page or so will do for most things. But you won’t go wrong with your boys and quite possibly even girls if you stick to my 25 and ignore the Guardian list.

And, please note, most of the good stuff was written before 1960. The English, broadly speaking, got better at the electric guitar after 1960 but got worse at the written word.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.