Joel Meares shares the last five books he's read
Joel Meares is the author of We’re All Going to Die (Especially Me). Here he tells us the last five books he’s read, and why.
Wild: From Lost To Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
I had a phone interview with Cheryl Strayed around the release of the Reese Witherspoon film and planned to just skim the book, journo-in-a-rush style, so I could work up some questions. But from page one, I was totally hooked, and I dove deep in. Strayed writes wonderfully – one minute pure poetry, the next a beautiful hard-smacking one-liner. And the actual thing she did – walking the Pacific Crest Trail – is one of those things that has me bowing down in awe. (I am the kind of guy who will always take the escalator, even if the not-too-steep staircase is right there.) Also: she was very excellent to speak to when we eventually got patched through.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Sometimes, rather randomly, I walk into the classics section, close my eyes and point: whatever my finger lands on is the next thing I read. I didn’t grow up in a literary household, and somehow skipped most of ‘the canon’ while studying English at uni, and I find this as efficient a way as any other to play some serious catch-up. Last time I played my game, I landed on Wilde’s tale of the literature’s original Mr Gray. And what a treat: Wilde’s wit and savageness combined with a narrative centred on obsession (a favourite theme of mine), which I read at a time when I was starting to get crow’s feet. Could not put it down.
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst is my favourite current writer – The Line of Beauty, his wonderful Booker-winning, Gatsby-esque tale of a young boy from the country having silly amounts of sex in late 1980s was enough to lure me out of the closet (really, it was while reading the book that I thought to myself, ‘Hey, maybe you’re not just staring/salivating at men because you’re intrigued by their style choices’). While many thought The Stranger’s Child was a dud, I thought it was complex and stimulating and… just go read it. But I recently picked up Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, which has a lot in common with Beauty – it’s the ’80s and people are hooking up in the lav. It shares the same frankness about gay life, and insight into a version of that life that is both foreign and familiar to my generation.
The Shining by Stephen King
It shames me to say, as a man who loves horror films, that I have never really gotten into horror novels (beyond, of course, my Christopher Pyke obsession circa 1998). And, as someone who has loved Kubrick’s film version of The Shining since I was way too young to have seen it, it shames me to say that I didn’t read Stephen King’s original novel until I was 29. It is everything that people say it is: psychologically complex, scary, economical but no, not as good as the movie (sorry Stephen).
Let Me Be Your Star by Rachel Shukert
This is actually an Amazon Single, and an odd one at that: writer Rachel Shukert recaps her experience recapping episodes of the musical TV show Smash for New York magazine’s Vulture website, for which she gained a following. I followed her recaps at the time – she is a theatre baby and brought that knowledge, along with a huge talent for writing/tearing characters to shreds, to her perceptive, addictive weekly reviews of the disastrous series (Smash, which followed the rise of an ingénue desperately trying to be cast in a Marilyn Monroe musical, inspired the term ‘hate watching’). It’s a bit insider-y (you had to be there) but also, for the uninitiated, a compelling look at the rise of the TV recap.
