Other lives, wider worlds, and something to laugh about
Ten books. One selection per author. And enough variety, I hope, to keep me interested for the next twenty years.
A little while ago I put together my Desert Island Ten novels. Then came Faith, Life and the Human Condition, which turned out to be a more personal list than I expected.
This third list may be the strangest of the three.
At first glance, there is no obvious common thread. History sits alongside science, a cookbook sits alongside political diaries, and a book about music finds itself sharing shelf space with one about the origins of the universe.
Yet looking at the finished list, I realised these books have something important in common. None is here simply because I feel I ought to admire it. They are books I have genuinely enjoyed, returned to, learned from and remembered. Some changed how I think, some made me laugh, some taught me things, and one or two became trusted companions.
The more I considered the choices, the more I recognised something from my fiction list. I enjoy escaping into other people’s worlds.
Those worlds do not have to be invented.
They might belong to an elite sportsman, a traveller crossing Afghanistan, a songwriter reflecting on his work or people trying to negotiate a political agreement without knowing whether they will succeed.
A real life can be just as absorbing as an imaginary one.
I also want variety. I would like to learn things, but I do not want every book to feel like homework. There should be room for curiosity, good food, music and a book that makes me laugh out loud.
Especially the last of those. Twenty years is a long time to spend taking everything seriously.
The rules and the reading order
Unlike my Fiction and Faith lists, these books are not ranked. I have arranged them in the order I might read them on the island. The aim is variety rather than importance: moving between people and ideas, history and humour, science and food, so that no single subject dominates for too long.
The one-author rule still applies. Otherwise Bill Bryson could start spreading into several sections, and choosing one Beatles-related book might become an elaborate exercise in finding loopholes.
Co-authored books count as one selection. So does a work originally published across more than one physical volume. I am taking The Lyrics, not attempting to establish a technical argument about the capacity of a suitcase.
These are not the ten most important works of non-fiction ever written. They are the books I would most like to have with me.
And this time the numbers are not a ranking.
I have arranged them in a possible reading order, changing the subject, voice and pace as I go. A person’s life, followed by science, food, travel, ideas, humour, biography, music, family history and politics.
Then, presumably, I would start again.
The intention is that no two neighbouring books feel too much alike. Their subjects overlap, of course, but that is part of the pleasure.
The island library
1. Open — Andre Agassi
2. A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
3. Economy Gastronomy — Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrett
4. The Places in Between — Rory Stewart
5. Dominion — Tom Holland
6. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys — Dave Barry
7. William Wilberforce — William Hague
8. The Lyrics — Paul McCartney
9. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad — Daniel Finkelstein
10. Power and the People, 1997–1999 — Alastair Campbell
1. Open
An Autobiography
The best sporting autobiography I have ever read and, in many ways, not really a sports book at all.
Agassi’s account of talent, pressure, expectation and identity is remarkably honest. Its opening, set during the final tournament of his career, is one of the finest I have read in any genre.
Before attempting to understand nearly everything, I can spend some time trying to understand one person. And Agassi provides plenty to think about.
The striking tension in Open is between extraordinary sporting achievement and a deeply troubled relationship with the sport itself. Being exceptionally good at something does not necessarily mean that doing it makes you happy.
From the outside, we see the matches, the success and the public figure. The autobiography takes us into the pressures and uncertainty behind them.
That is what makes a life story absorbing. Someone who appears familiar turns out to be considerably more complicated than the version we thought we knew.
There is tennis here, naturally. But the appeal of the book does not depend on wanting an extended account of results and trophies. It is the person living through those events who gives them their interest.
Ultimately, this is a book about perseverance, self-discovery and becoming comfortable in your own skin. I would want books like that on the island: lives I can become caught up in, with enough complexity to remain interesting after I know what happens.
Why take it to the island?
For the opportunity to enter a world very different from my own, and the reminder that success as it looks from the outside may feel quite different from within.
2. A Short History of Nearly Everything
After one person’s life, something a little broader.
The universe, for example.
Bryson’s title makes a wonderfully ambitious promise, softened by the word “nearly”. It leaves him a little room to manoeuvre.
It is a breathtakingly ambitious book that somehow manages to make science entertaining. Bryson approaches it as a curious amateur asking sensible questions, rather than assuming everyone else already understands the answers.
The book ranges across the origins of the universe, the Earth and life, asking how we came to know what we know. That last part matters. Scientific knowledge can seem inevitable when presented as a sequence of established facts. The route to understanding is rather less tidy.
There are people involved, with questions, competing explanations and the capacity to get things wrong. Discovery becomes a human activity rather than simply a collection of answers.
Rather than feeling like a textbook, it feels like spending time with an intelligent friend who is endlessly fascinated by the world. It reminds me how much there is to know, and how little we really understand.
Bryson offers a different kind of escape from Agassi. Instead of becoming absorbed in the pressures of one life, I can step back and consider the extraordinary circumstances in which any of us are here at all.
There would also be something reassuring about taking a book whose subject I am unlikely to exhaust.
Why take it to the island?
For curiosity, perspective and the pleasure of discovering how much there still is to understand.
If I am going to spend twenty years looking at the sea and the sky, I might as well occasionally try to understand them.
3. Economy Gastronomy
Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrett
Eat Better and Spend Less
At this point someone may reasonably ask why I am taking a cookbook.
This one was recommended by friends many years ago and has probably been used more often in our kitchen than books by Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson or Nigel Slater.
There are recipes I still return to, not least a magnificent leg of lamb that has become something of a family favourite.
I could offer a practical argument, although it would depend on the island possessing a rather better-stocked kitchen than is usual in these scenarios.
But books about food can provide pleasure even when we are not standing over a saucepan.
They invite us to imagine flavours, meals and the small satisfactions of making something good. After the scale of Bryson, I rather like the prospect of coming back to the kitchen.
Economy Gastronomy is built around planning, shopping thoughtfully and using ingredients well. It combines practicality with generosity and manages to be economical without ever feeling mean.
That makes it a different sort of companion from the histories and memoirs. I can browse, consider possibilities and think about how one meal might lead to another.
It also reminds me that an island library ought to reflect ordinary pleasures as well as grand interests. Food deserves a place alongside politics, science and music.
Otherwise this could become a very earnest collection indeed.
Why take it to the island?
For the pleasure of thinking about good food, and an approach that values making the most of what is available.
Although I reserve the right to complain if every recipe has to be adapted to include coconut.
4. The Places in Between
Now I would like to get off the island for a while.
In my imagination, at least.
Stewart’s account of walking across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002 offers a considerable change of scene. The journey depends on encounters with people along the way and the difficult business of moving through a place on foot.
I should acknowledge something here. I disagree with Rory Stewart’s politics much of the time, and I do not particularly enjoy listening to him at length.
His travelling, however, interests me enormously.
I see no difficulty in holding those views together. Enjoying a writer does not require approving of everything they say or finding every aspect of their public personality appealing.
In this book, I want to accompany the traveller.
What stays with me is not geopolitics but the people, landscapes and encounters. History seems visible everywhere, yet life continues one conversation, one village and one act of hospitality at a time.
That fits what I enjoy in reading. I want to be taken somewhere sufficiently convincing that, for a while, I stop thinking about where I am.
Why take it to the island?
Because the physical limits of an island need not become the limits of my imagination.
And because I can enjoy travelling with Stewart on the page without agreeing to spend the entire voyage discussing politics with him.
5. Dominion
The Making of the Western Mind
Perhaps the most intellectually influential book on this list, Dominion would have been very close to the top if this were a conventional ranking.
Its position here is simply where I would like to encounter it in the reading sequence.
Holland examines Christianity’s influence on the Western world, including the assumptions that can survive even when explicit religious belief has faded. His argument asks us to look again at ideas we may regard as natural or self-evident and consider how historically particular they are.
That gives the book an obvious connection with my faith collection. I have placed it here because its scope is historical and cultural: the development of a world of thought, rather than primarily an exploration of personal belief.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, the book changed the way I think about history, morality and culture. It helped me understand why Christianity has shaped the West far more profoundly than many people realise.
But a book that gives us a substantial argument to return to has a strong claim on island space.
The escape here is across time. I can move beyond the assumptions of my own period and consider how people in very different circumstances understood power, weakness, obligation and human worth.
Why take it to the island?
Because it offers a great deal to think about, and because understanding the history of our assumptions can make the familiar world look rather less familiar.
It is the kind of book I would expect to keep arguing with, which is useful when the alternative audience is a seagull.
6. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys
After all that, I need a laugh.
I love books that make me laugh out loud, and Dave Barry has been doing that for decades.
Humour sometimes gets treated as a lesser achievement than making a reader think or cry. I am not convinced it is any easier. The timing has to work. The observation has to land. The ridiculous has to retain enough connection with the recognisable for us to see ourselves in it.
Complete Guide to Guys is gloriously ridiculous. Its absurd observations about masculinity and human behaviour remain funny on multiple readings.
There is a particular pleasure in an apparently reasonable explanation that gradually becomes absurd, especially when the behaviour being explained was fairly absurd to begin with.
I do not need to turn that pleasure into an elaborate justification. A book that reliably makes me laugh is doing something I value.
An island library should include a book I can pick up when I have had enough of the weightier subjects. I may admire the seriousness of the other selections, but I do not intend to spend every evening contemplating civilisation.
Why take it to the island?
Because I would want to laugh.
I think that is sufficient reason, although I am sure Barry could manufacture a much longer and less sensible explanation.
7. William Wilberforce
The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
After Barry, a change of company and century.
This is a superb biography, and one that captures perseverance as well as achievement. Wilberforce spent years pursuing a goal that must often have looked impossible, while maintaining deep personal convictions and strong friendships.
The book sits at the intersection of politics, faith and public service, three subjects that have always interested me. It also raises a question that interests me in the Campbell diaries: how does conviction become something concrete?
Looking back, it is easy to compress political change into a successful vote or a familiar name. Living through it involves delay, resistance and uncertainty about whether anything will be achieved.
That is part of the attraction of biography. We can see someone acting within the limitations of their own time, rather than simply occupying the position history has assigned them.
Wilberforce’s faith matters to the story, but this is also a life lived through politics, relationships and campaigning. And his contribution belongs within a much wider struggle, involving many other people, including enslaved people resisting their own oppression.
I would not want the pleasure of an individual biography to obscure that wider picture.
There is also an interesting distance between this book and Dominion: the broader history of ideas alongside one person attempting to act on his convictions.
Why take it to the island?
For an absorbing historical life, and the chance to consider the persistence required to turn a moral argument into political action.
Knowing that change eventually came does not remove the interest of discovering how difficult it was to achieve.
8. The Lyrics
1956 to the Present — edited and introduced by Paul Muldoon
Music had to be here.
I have been a Beatles fan for as long as I can remember, and I have seen Paul McCartney perform twice. I remain in awe of his songwriting skill and brilliance, and of what he, Lennon and the others did to change music.
The Lyrics gives that admiration somewhere to go beyond simply declaring that I love the songs.
The lyrics sit alongside McCartney’s reflections on their creation, with material from his archive. The result allows me to spend time with the work and with the life around it.
What I enjoy most is how naturally music becomes a lens through which to view a life. The anecdotes and memories matter because they surround work that already means something to me.
Seeing familiar lyrics on a page can change the encounter too. A phrase can catch our attention differently when it is not being carried along by the melody.
Yet the melody is never very far away.
That gives this book a particular advantage on an island. I could open it at a song and hear something of the music in my head. Reading could become a form of listening, accompanied by memories of the songs and of seeing their creator perform.
I would not have to read it straight through every time either. There would be room to browse, linger and return.
Why take it to the island?
For the songwriting, the stories and the music it would bring back to me.
The one-author rule has prevented the Beatles from taking over the entire collection. It was never going to keep them out altogether.
9. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad
A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival
This was one of the definite choices: a remarkable and deeply moving book, and one of the most affecting history books I have read.
The title places two dictators beside two family words. That proximity captures something essential about the book: the collision of vast historical forces with the lives of particular people.
Finkelstein recounts his parents’ and their families’ experiences of persecution and survival under Nazism and Stalinism. History enters the home and determines what happens to people who have very little power over it.
It is a demanding inclusion in a collection partly about escape. There is no suggestion that I would want to escape into those circumstances.
But becoming absorbed in a life can involve bearing witness as well as seeking pleasure. The fact that a story is painful does not make the people within it less important to spend time with.
The personal scale matters. Political labels and historical summaries can create distance. A family story asks us to pay attention to individuals, their relationships and the precarious circumstances of survival.
It also provides a necessary change in perspective after the lives of people with public influence. Here, the consequences of power are experienced by those subjected to it.
Why take it to the island?
Because a collection I want to live with should contain books that ask something of me.
And because these lives deserve attention beyond the first reading, when the uncertainty of what happens next is no longer the only reason to continue.
10. The Alastair Campbell Diaries — Power and the People
Volume Two — 1997–1999
I would finish this first circuit of the library in the early years of the Blair government.
This is deliberately the period before the Iraq war. My interest here is in the personalities, the atmosphere of the time and, particularly, the negotiations surrounding the Good Friday Agreement.
What gripped me was the anguish and struggle involved in trying to reach an agreement that would lead to something concrete.
We know the broad outcome. The people conducting the negotiations did not have that reassurance. They had to keep going through uncertainty, disagreement and the possibility that the effort might fail.
The diary form helps recover something of that feeling. It lets events arrive in sequence, among the other pressures and preoccupations of the day. A result that looks inevitable in a retrospective summary becomes uncertain again.
That is the world I want to enter: the personalities in the rooms, the tensions between them and the difficulty of moving from competing positions towards an agreement.
Campbell is a participant with loyalties and a perspective of his own. These are his diaries, not a neutral transcript of everything that happened. Their interest does not require forgetting that distinction.
Nor does choosing the book amount to endorsing an entire government. I can find the account compelling because of what it lets me observe and consider.
Why take it to the island?
For the personalities and the feel of a particular time, and for the reminder that meaningful political outcomes emerge from difficult human work.
After that, I might be ready to return to Agassi. Or perhaps to give the reading order a temporary holiday and reach straight for Dave Barry.
The substitutes bench
Choosing ten inevitably means leaving good books behind. These three remain close enough to make me question the final selection.
Broken Greek
A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs
Paphides writes about growing up in Birmingham as the child of Greek-Cypriot parents, with the family chip shop and pop music central to his world.
It offers another route into the relationship between music and a life. Where McCartney reflects on creating songs, Paphides writes from the listener’s side, where songs can help make sense of belonging and growing up.
That gives it a strong claim on this collection. A childhood remembered through music can be a wonderfully absorbing world to enter.
Its place on the bench should not be mistaken for a dismissal. It is one of the books that makes the arbitrary limit of ten particularly inconvenient.
The Old Ways
A Journey on Foot
Macfarlane follows old routes through landscapes, exploring the relationship between walking, place and the lives and stories associated with paths.
It offers a different experience from Stewart’s journey. There is room here for attention to landscape and to the ways earlier travellers remain present in the routes we use.
For an island collection, the appeal is obvious: a book that allows the mind to keep walking when the available territory has become rather familiar.
I can easily imagine it finding its way into the ten. Choosing Stewart does not settle the argument permanently.
31 Songs
Also published in the United States as Songbook
Of the books on the bench, this may have the most direct connection with the exercise itself.
What I love is the attention Hornby gives to songs that matter to him. The interest lies in explaining the attachment, rather than simply presenting a league table of the greatest songs ever recorded.
That is very close to what I am trying to do with these lists.
I also love his account of being a Dylan listener. Paraphrasing from memory, he owns more Dylan albums than his mother owns albums, yet hesitates to call himself a Dylan fan because he knows what Dylan fans are like, and he is not one of them.
That is brilliant.
It recognises the absurdity of measuring affection against somebody else’s level of devotion. There will always be someone with more records, more knowledge or stronger opinions about an obscure performance.
Hornby makes room for a more personal relationship with music. A song can mean a great deal without requiring us to defend its position in the canon.
If this list changes before the boat leaves, 31 Songs is a serious candidate for promotion.
Looking back
Reviewing all three Desert Island lists, a pattern emerges.
The novels are largely about stories. The faith books are about how to live. These non-fiction books are about understanding the world: history, science, politics, food, travel, music and human nature.
Taken together, they probably tell me more about myself than I realised when I started compiling them.
Looking at the ten together, I notice that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction matters less to my enjoyment than I might have expected.
I still want convincing worlds and people whose company can hold my attention. I still want to become sufficiently absorbed that the room around me disappears for a while.
The difference is that these writers are working with lives and events that belong to the world we share. That brings responsibilities of its own. A memoir has a perspective. A diary has loyalties. A history advances an interpretation. Enjoying the storytelling need not mean suspending judgement.
Company does not require agreement
The Stewart choice makes this particularly clear. I can disagree with someone politically and still value the journey they describe.
Similarly, I can find Campbell’s account of negotiation compelling without treating his perspective as the final word. And I can engage seriously with Holland’s argument without imagining that a substantial historical question has therefore been settled.
I would not want an island library populated exclusively by people who confirm everything I already think.
Although I would appreciate it if they allowed me the occasional quiet evening.
Variety is part of the pleasure
The reading order matters because I want different experiences from the collection.
After science, there is food. After ideas, laughter. After biography, music. Some books invite sustained reading; others can be opened for a shorter visit.
I suspect the order would not survive twenty years unchanged. Some days would call for a long historical argument. Others would call for a familiar song or something gloriously silly.
That would be a good reason to have chosen broadly in the first place.
Books that matter
Hornby’s place on the bench brings me back to a distinction running through all three lists. Admiration, enjoyment and personal significance overlap, but they are not identical.
McCartney is here partly because of the songs and partly because of my relationship with them. Campbell is here because a particular period and its difficult negotiations caught my attention. Dave Barry is here because laughter belongs in my life as much as serious thought does.
Those are personal reasons. They are also the reasons that make the choices worth explaining.
The question is not simply which books deserve a place on a list. It is which books I would want to keep opening.
Over to You
Which ten works of non-fiction would you take?
Would your collection contain biographies, history, science, travel, food, humour or something I have entirely overlooked?
Which books have taken you into someone else’s world? Which have changed the way you understand your own? And which would still be welcome company after the fifth or sixth reading?
One selection per author, please.
And if you want to promote something from my substitutes bench, you will have to tell me what comes out.
That is where the apparently simple exercise becomes difficult all over again.
And if anyone has reached this point without mentally rewriting all three lists with their own choices, I shall be very surprised indeed.
Looking back over the final ten, one omission surprised even me.
There isn’t a single football book in the collection.
Given that I’ve spent most of my life following Manchester United, many people would probably expect one to appear.
The reason isn’t a lack of affection for football. Quite the opposite.
I suspect it’s because the best football books tend to illuminate a world I already know reasonably well. The books that survived tended to take me somewhere less familiar: into science, Afghanistan, nineteenth-century politics, twentieth-century history, songwriting, cooking or the origins of modern ideas.
Football remains one of my great enthusiasms. Strangely, it just didn’t make my desert-island library.
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