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Saturday 14 January 2017

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10 books to get men reading

As a survey declares that 63 per cent of men think they don't read enough, this is our list of recent titles – fiction and non-fiction – that can get men back to books

As with his recent books on the Second World War, Hastings adopts a cosmopolitan approach in which Britain takes her proper place as just one among the combatant nations – and numerically a very small player at that. Ranging across the war’s many theatres, from Russia and Prussia to the Balkans and the Vosges, as well as the more familiar Flanders, Hastings presents individual tragedies alongside the grand strategy in one overarching whole. And, in typically robust style, he gives short shrift both to what he sees as the skewed “poets’ view” of the war as unmitigated futility, and to pro-German revisionists seeking to clear Berlin of blame for starting the conflict.

This is a large book whose ambition is splendidly realised. Wilson charts and celebrates a 1,000-year love affair between our islands and the seaborne branch of the armed forces. Wilson’s clever digressions into Britain’s linguistic, commercial, artistic and imperial history are wound around an energetic narrative of battles and bravado. The sea boils and timbers creak as you read this smart, salty, invigorating work.

The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Gabriele D'Annunzio may have been a goggle-eyed gargoyle but was irresistible – to Italian crowds, as the man who could save their national honour; and to women, who stampeded to lose theirs. As one of his mistresses ruefully remarked: “In heaven, dear poet, there will be reserved for you an enormous octopus with a thousand women’s legs (but no head).” D’Annunzio was a man of letters – his collected works run to 48 volumes – and was ranked by Joyce alongside Kipling and Tolstoy; but he was also a frenzied demagogue for whom writing was a martial art “to spark uprisings and to set nations ablaze”. Craving cataclysmic violence, he helped to create the appetite for fascism, plus many of its motifs. This biography is as well written as it is expertly structured.

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic

This is the perfect antidote to the annihilating tedium of post-match interview cliché. In order to assure us he is not going to be fettered by professional etiquette, he takes down Pep Guardiola first. That’s right, Saint Pep, the architect of a Barcelona side that might just be the greatest in history. You have to go a long way in football to hear a bad word spoken about Guardiola. By the end of chapter one Ibrahimovic has told him he is a “spineless coward” who “doesn’t have any balls”.

Let’s be clear: Ibrahimovic is preposterous. On page two he describes himself as “amazing”. On page three he is “awesome”. On page four he comes over all modest and tones it down to “pretty awesome”. He relays anecdotes in which he talks about himself in the third person. He is utterly convinced of his own divinity. And downright compelling it is too.

What prevents this from being a mere exercise in self-aggrandisement is Ibrahimovic’s irrepressible charisma. Behind the bluster there is a story of a child from an immigrant Bosnian family trying to make it in a world discomfited by his presumption. Time and again he proves people wrong, riding the wave of his phenomenal talent. That’s the thing with Ibrahimovic: he’s pretty much as good as he thinks he is.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn Turner

Turner begins his story with the fall of Thatcher and concludes in 2001 with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He takes a firm grip both on the politics and the cultural developments of his decade, although with chapter titles such as “Lads”, “Cool” and “Enter Tony Blair”, readers may find themselves squirming as they read. Did that really just happen? But Turner’s subject matter is no reflection on his immense gifts as a chronicler and historian – as a first take on a decade whose wounds remain partially open, this is essential reading.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

This was published slap-bang amid the first wave of Prism revelations, which dedicated fans naturally took as the final proof that America’s arch-novelist of paranoia really does know something we don’t. Set in 2001, in the New York dotcom bubble that preceded the 9/11 attacks, this was Pynchon’s best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

A a satirical thriller about a large Californian company, crewed by bright-eyed twentysomething idealists, that sets out to make life better by making all the world’s data public to everyone. The Circle is sometimes silly, but its Google-gone-wrong message has a chilling fascination; and Eggers packages the whole thing with sleek professionalism.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The novel does not waste any time. It begins with an Italian soldier beating a German to death with a motorcycle headlamp during the First World War, then jumps to a young woman hurtling through the Nevada desert on the back of a high-performance motorcycle. It sets you up for what is to come: the seductions of speed and violence. Kushner is asking questions about youthful ardency and its consequences, and in search of answers she criss-crosses the 20th century, from colonial Egypt to the New York art scene of the Seventies, from the rubber plantations of Brazil to the chaos of the “Years of Lead” in Italy.

Tenth of December by George Saunders

The winner of the Folio Prize writes genuinely strange stories. Not in an ostentatious way, but with creeping clarity. It takes place in a world you recognise – the suburbs, the television, the ads for anything – yet it is tilted at such a dark angle that only Saunders could have thought of it and presented it with humour. Imagine Michael Haneke’s Funny Games or the end of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, with jokes. It’s no surprise that the late David Foster Wallace once described Saunders as “the most exciting writer in America”.

A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Norwegian writer who scandalised Scandinavia with his punishingly honest record of the triumphs and banalities of his own life. Volume two treats midlife crisis, a new partner and fatherhood with equal disturbing straightforwardness, but admirers of Knausgaard’s strange anti-Proustian project will creep with terrible willingness into its coils.

The survey of men’s reading habits was commissioned by the Reading Agency to mark World Book Night on April 23.

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Read: Why don't young men read novels any more?

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