Robert McCrum / Features / Untitled Books

"Captain Ahab is one of American literature's towering creations."

Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum is the author of several novels and three works of non-fiction. He was a Publishing Director at Faber and Faber, and literary editor of the Observer for many years. His most recent book is Globish.

Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse.

After I finished my life of Wodehouse in 2004 I decided I would take a self-imposed break from reading his work. Recently, commissioned to write an introduction to a PGW anthology, I've come out of purdah. And what a delight it has been! Joy in the Morning is possibly PGWs masterpiece: it's a Jeeves and Wooster novel set in the country home, Steeple Bumpleigh, of Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha. As well as its joyously madcap plot (perfectly narrated as usual) the novel contains some of Wodehouse's best lines. My favourite is "He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat's milk." Genius.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I was first introduced to this great novel in an abridged version at school, and was utterly intimidated by it. Now, having found several friends reading it on the sly, I have been tempted to immerse myself in the real thing. It's an extraordinary experience: operatic in its range of emotions, Biblical in its intensity and profoundly American in the urgency of its quest for a resolution to troubling experience. Some of it is, I'm surprised to find, very funny. And the character of Captain Ahab is one of American literature's towering creations. Hemingway used to say that all US writing came from Twain. In a modern sense, all the most interesting contemporary American prose comes from Melville.

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

Waiting for a book to come out, as I am at the moment with Globish, one is slightly distracted. I found this life of Fleming in a second hand bookshop. It's an early life, and has the flaws of the first life, but Pearson knows his subject well and writes economically about the extraordinary childhood and wartime career of the man who invented 007.

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Globish; How the English Language Became the World's Language is published by Penguin.

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Thursday, 24 June, 2010