My guest this week once offered a Star Wars book to anyone at Noir at the Bar that would wail like a Wookie. To this day I still have that book.  He is also the first guest to tell me they wanted to select five comic books for their Decades choices – I may need to invite him back just so I can see which books he would have selected.

Don’t mourn the loss of Jay’s comic book picks as he has selected five quality novels which I am delighted to add to my Decades Library.

For those not familiar with #Decades a quick recap. Each week I invite a guest to join me and select five unmissable or essential reads which they would want to see included in my Ultimate Library. When this project started back in January I had no books and a mountain to climb, week on week my guests have selected five books and my library is filling up. You can see all the previous selections (and buy any which catch your eye) here at Bookshop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/GrabThisBookDecades

Choosing five books may be challenging but I add a second rule which my guests need to follow.  They can only select one book per decade over five consecutive decades – so they have any fifty year publication span to select from.

This week I am delighted to welcome Jay Stringer to Grab This Book.  As Jay is Glasgow based he is one of the few guests I have actually met and I was thrilled he was able to make time to take on the Decades challenge. Jay’s latest book Don’t Tell a Soul is my current read and it’s flipping brilliant, putting it down to prep this post was a wrench.

So I pass you over to Jay but before I do – here is how you get Don’t Tell a Soul: https://www.waterstones.com/book/dont-tell-a-soul/jay-stringer/9781916892309

Jay Stringer was born in 1980, and he’s not dead yet. His crime fiction has been nominated for both Anthony and Derringer awards, and shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize. His stand-up comedy has been laughed at by at least three people. He was born and raised in the Black Country, but has since adopted Glasgow as his hometown.

Jay’s newest book Don’t Tell a Soul was released on July 26^th.

Also, Jay’s birthday was July 26^th. You know what to do.

DECADES

One book from each decade? That’s a crazy rule. I hate rules. So the only way I’m going to get through this is imposing a few more on myself.

1. I can’t just pick an Elmore Leonard book for each decade (because, seriously, I could.)
2. No comic books. (Because once I open that door, I pick nothing but comic books.)

Okay. On with the list.

1970’s. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

This decade was hard. So many great books. So many great Elmore Leonard books. But Douglas Adams was one of my gateway drugs to reading novels, as a struggling dyslexic teen, and it still holds up today. Funny. Satirical. Basically accurate and mostly harmless. One of the funniest books ever written.

1980’s. The Demon Headmaster – Gillian Cross

I was a child during the 80’s, and I can’t remove myself from that. This pick is all about memories. Again, as a dyslexic I didn’t read much prose early on. Choose Your Own Adventure books were pretty much my speed, and the rest was comic books. (The 80’s was a great decade for comics.) But I read the hell out of The Demon Headmaster. And had it read to me just as much.

1990’s. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge

Now then. We. Are. Talking. I love this book. I’d get an all-over body tattoo of this book if I could. What’s it about? No idea. There’s magic, gambling, revenge, and a big diamond. It’s sort of like what Harry Potter would be if he was a cool kid who drank a lot and wanted to be in a punk band. And it’s funny, moving, and occasionally deep. Jim Dodge’s writing is all about the journey, not so much about the destination. But it’s a great journey.

2000’s. Pagan Babies – Elmore Leonard

This isn’t Elmore’s best book. But it might be the one that stayed with me the longest after I read it. The key to understanding Leonard is that he was always writing about self-awareness. About characters becoming better or worse at being who they really are. And he often also explored the huge grey area between right/wrong and legal/illegal. Pagan Babies feels like the ultimate distillation of these themes into something simple and primal. And, placed where it is in his career, it feels like the summation of his themes, before he became a little more self-indulgent in his last few books.

2010’s. Recursion – Blake Crouch

It’s not often a book blows me away. I don’t just mean I enjoyed it. I enjoy a lot of books. But this one simply blew me away. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. Though to talk too much about it is to ruin the fun. It’s a sci-fi story at heart. But it also feels like it’s about fake news, and the way we’re all living in different realities right now. It’s about the way I can remember using the King Kong statue in Birmingham as a meeting point with friends, even though it left Birmingham four years before I was born. It’s a brilliant book. Go buy it.

Thanks again to Jay for these brilliant selections.  If you want to know his comic book selections then tweet him @JayStringer and ask him to tell you what he would have picked! If you do happen to follow him over on Twitter it also helps to know Jay is a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan and this can result in some cryptic sounding tweets landing on your timeline most weekends.

DECADES WILL RETURN