MY FAVOURITE BOOKS

One of the most common questions authors get asked, other than "Where do you get your ideas?", "Have any of your books been turned into movies?" and "So what do you really do for a living?", is "What are your biggest inspirations?"

I'm inspired by many things and as time goes on, I plan to share them on here because this is my website and I can do what I damn well please with it.

And so we begin with what I consider to be my definitive Top 10 books of all time. This isn't an exhaustive list, and some of these books aren't even the best works of the authors I've mentioned. But these are the 10 that have influenced me the most. Well, them and like 300 other books.

Yes these are mostly classic or famous books, no I'm not recommending some obscure gems that no one else has ever heard of, but, well, I like what I like, okay? Go and be judgemental to someone who cares.

Childhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke

This was the book that made me want to start writing again in my late 20s. It's an utterly mind-bending, mesmerising experience - so simple and yet so complex at the same time. What starts off as a bog standard alien invasion story quickly turns into something absolutely transcendent.

Ubik

Philip K. Dick

I had to limit myself to only two PKD books on this list, otherwise the entire list would be Philip K Dick, but of his incredible oeuvre, Ubik stands out as probably his best work. But remember - Ubik is only safe when read as directed!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

I was going to try and do just one book per author on this list, but Philip K Dick has been too big of an influence on me to relegate to just one book. This is the one by him that everyone knows, thanks to Blade Runner, and while the film is one of my all-time favourites, the book and movie are vastly different from each other. This is pretty much my idea of a perfect book - it's funny, it's philosophical, it's satirical, it's VERY weird and also it has sheep in it, which speaking as a New Zealander is a big deal to me.

Flowers For Algernon

Daniel Keyes

I'm not a particularly emotional guy, so when I say "This book broke me" you'd better brace yourself. One of the most brilliant, harrowing and heart-breaking things I've ever read.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

This is one of those books that I read thinking "There's no way in hell I'm going to like this" but it ended up becoming, literally, one of my all-time favourites. What's really special about literature, as compared to any other medium, is that reading is an act of empathy. This book is very feminine, quite feminist, and a brutally honest portrayal of depression and mental illness which changed the way I think and feel about a lot of things in the world.

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

I was originally going to put Gravity's Rainbow on here, but the truth is that as much as I love that book, I understood less than 10% of it. The Crying of Lot 49 amazed me in much the same way as Pynchon's other works - except this time I actually understood what was going on. Well, kind of. It's still very weird, very paranoid and very ambiguous. And I love that.

The Man Who Was Thursday

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton has been a pretty big influence on me, not just in terms of writing but also in terms of politics and philosophy. This novel is absolutely mad, and features I think the first car chase scene in history. And I can 100% guarantee you will not be able to predict the ending.

Jennifer Government

Max Barry

I was trying to decide between including this or Lexicon, but Max Barry has been a surprisingly big influence on me. I've read all of his books and they're always very interesting and very enjoyable, straddling the line between high octane sci fi and laugh-out-loud hilarity. It's also worth mentioning that I honed a lot of my writing abilities while roleplaying on his website, Nationstates, back in my late teens and early 20s.

The Stand

Stephen King

It's hard to say exactly what book made me want to be a writer, but I know this book played a huge hand in that. I read it when I was 13 or 14 and it blew my little mind. It's also a rare example of an absolute doorstopper that I recall reading in a week flat over the summer holidays. (Though, at the risk of admitting my age, this was pre-internet and pre-smartphone so it's not like I had much else to distract me). Even so it's an absolutely epic story that I've never really stopped thinking about ever since I first read it.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

I'll be honest: I actually preferred Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King to this. However, Infinite Jest deserves to be on this list because of the impact it had on me as a reader, as a writer and as a human being. This book opened my eyes to just what was possible with the medium of literature, at a time when I'd only really been exposed to very simplistic, very tropey, genre fiction. While this book is a bit of a slog to get through at times, it's an absolutely virtuoso literary performance that I could never come close to reaching in my wildest dreams.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I know this was supposed to be a Top 10 list but I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't mention the huge impact that Kurt Vonnegut has had on me. Every book I've ever read by him has been utterly perfect. I first read Slaughterhouse Five around the same time that I read Childhood's End and I distinctly remember thinking at the time, "If I ever wrote a novel, I'd want it to be a bit like this one."