Another week and I bring word of a new booklover who is prepared to don the Hat of the Curator and help me select five books which are to be added to my Ulimate Library.

What is this Library?  Back in January I had the thought – if I were to build a library from scratch, no books on any shelves, which books would I need to ensure were included? Clearly this was too much of a challenge to take on personally so I started inviting guests to join me and I asked each of them to select five books to include in the Library.

Two Rules:
1 – Select Five Books
2 – Guests can only pick one book per decade over five consecutive decades.

My guest today is Raven from Raven Crime Reads. Raven and I began blogging around the same time and I often find when I am honoured with a review quote inside a book that Raven is also quoted in that same book.  We share a mutual appreciation of many authors.  However, as her selections will reveal, Raven reads a much broader range than I and she has a fabulous eye for choosing a brilliant story. There are many bookbloggers sharing the booklove but Raven’s reviews are ones I will always make time to read – I am thrilled she agreed to join me for this challenge.

I always invite my guests to introduce themselves so I hand over to Raven (who seemingly has another name too) and ask her to introduce her books.

Decades

Hi, this is Jackie aka Raven Crime Reads , a blog that I started 8 years ago following a very inspiring conversation at a crime festival with two excellent crime writers, William Ryan and William Shaw- my favourite type of bills. I’m also known for my poor jokes. I am a judge for the annual Petrona Award for Scandinavian Crime Fiction with the wonderful Kat Hall (Mrs. Peabody Investigates ) and Karen Meek (Euro Crime) focusing on one of the most popular sub genres of crime, and something that sings to the depths of my dark soul. Crikey. And swiftly moving on, although my blog is centred on my love of crime fiction, I read widely from fiction to horror to science to nature to history to whatever…

I’m now based in the South West of England after living up and down the country, and have been a bookseller with Waterstones for almost twenty years, which runs alongside my role as a commercial expert and buyer for stores in my local region. I have a BA in English Literature and an MA in British and American Fiction, and like many other people my love of reading was fostered from an early age. With my particular background, and books having been a bit of a luxury, libraries were an absolute lifeline as a book obsessed little kid. The holy grail of my adult library card at the age of ten, and having a voracious reader for a mum all the way, held me in good stead for my very book-related journey through life.

For more of my bookish ramblings and other nonsense, you can find me on Twitter @ravencrime, and for far more sensible book stuff at GoodReads too.

And so to Gordon’s challenge, and what a challenge, to find five favourite reads in five consecutive decades. I think I severely under-estimated this difficulty of this, as many scribblings, post-its and Googled publication dates later, it has taken some time to get this final five nailed down. But here they are in all their glory, beginning in the 1970’s through to the 2010s…

1970-1979 Maj Sjöwall &  Per Wahlöö – The Abominable Man (1971)

To be honest, I could have picked any one of the ten book series collectively titled The Story Of A Crime by the superb writing partnership of Maj Sjöwall &  Per Wahlöö, but have always loved this one in particular for the amount of peril their chief protagonist, homicide detective Martin Beck finds himself in. Undoubtedly this series of books, aside from influencing generations of Scandinavian crime writers, kickstarted my passion for the genre. With its emphasis on the socio-political climate of the time, the relatively pared down writing style and the accomplished structuring of compelling police procedurals, this series stood above its time, and ignited the passion for Scandinavian crime that has remained with me ever since.

1980- 1989 Mark Timlin- A Good Year For The Roses (1988)

Strongly influenced by Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, Mark Timlin’s series featuring  Nick Sharman, a former Met police officer turned private investigator in South London, was one I raced through in my late teens- A Good Year For The Roses is the first of the series. Having already read McBain’s 87th Precinct series (which also remains a favourite) I loved the grimy noir feeling of Timlin’s writing, and his maverick protagonist operating outside of the law, and still enjoy the ‘private investigation’ genre for the freedom it gives crime writers to place their characters in more physical and moral danger. Sharman was an exemplar of this, with his fair share of violent encounters , a cynical wit, and his somewhat fluid moral approach to the cases he undertakes. Timlin’s writing style made a big impression for me, and still influences the kind of noir detective/P.I. fiction that I tend to read- real punchy noir. There is also a strong influence of music in his books which has stayed with me, and has led to my love of writers like Doug Johnstone for example who punctuates his books with musical references.

1990- 1999 Tim O’Brien- The Things They Carried (1990)

My interest in the war genre really started growing up in the naval city of Portsmouth in the 1980’s, where the Falklands conflict was particularly resonant in our consciousness. On the back of this I started to develop an interest in the Vietnam War, as another singularly pointless war, and read books such as Dispatches by Michael Herr and A Rumor Of War by Philip Caputo, and then started looking for fiction, stumbling upon Tim O’Brien, whose books just blew me away, later forming the basis for my MA dissertation. O’Brien’s books based on his own tours in Vietnam, have a layer of sensitivity that underpin his always central theme of the human heart under stress. This book in particular, really emphasises the emotional lives of men in conflict, and the need to hold on to the human connection, be it with their fellow soldiers or those they left behind. He never shirks from the violence and pity of war, but digs down beneath the surface of these soldiers’ lives as they fight to survive, mixing brutal reality with a real sense of poignancy.

2000-2009 Don Winslow- The Power Of The Dog (2005)

You know that phrase about never meeting your heroes? Well try writing about them! I absolutely adore Don Winslow’s writing and will only add my still small voice to the overwhelming acclaim that this book has gathered from writers and readers alike. With six years research and being the first instalment of a sweeping trilogy (preceeding The Cartel and The Border) The Power Of The Dog is hands down one of, if not the best, thriller I have ever read. Spanning decades and continents, Winslow’s astute, visceral, authentic, multi-voiced and utterly compelling book focussing on the DEA’S war on drugs, is a masterclass in thriller writing, with no let up of this in the other two books in the trilogy. Rooted in the harsh reality of the international drug trade, with such close adherance to socio-economic and political fact, and peopled with a cast of characters that will anger, enthral or tap your empathy in equal measure, this is an absolute classic.

2010-2019 Antonin Varenne- Retribution Road (2014)

And the difficulty of this Decades challenge continues trying to pick a standout book from recent years, but this is it. To be quite honest, I could have picked any of Varenne’s books for this as Bed Of Nails, Loser’s Corner, or Equator (the follow up to Retribution Road) are superb too, but Retribution Road it is.  A sprawling 700+ page novel structured in three parts, with a real feeling of a classic quest or odyssey, the book follows Arthur Bowman, a former soldier, an avenging angel and pioneer from conflict in Burma, to Victorian London and finally to the swathes of unconquered territory in America in the grip of the gold rush. A complex and challenging novel it encompasses themes of war, revenge, violence, human connection, religion, compassion and emotional strife, and supported with the beautifully naturalistic writing of landscape (another of my passions) throughout I was just entranced by this. Not an easy read but so, so worth it…

My deepest thanks to Raven for finding time to share her selections. Once again I do feel a degree of guilt over the angst I caused.  But come back in a fortnight when my guest, who will take Decades into the month of May, told me she had found the challenge “EASY” and had no problems making her choices!

As you may have noticed I like to gauge the depth of my reading knowledge by measuring how many of the selections I have previously read.  Raven has left me red-faced this week as I have not read any of her choices but I have since sneakily added two of the five to my TBR.

If you want to visit the Library and see all the selections made to date then you need to click here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

DECADES WILL RETURN