Salena Godden’s Top Ten
It is so difficult for me to choose just ten books. I read broadly and widely and often. Reading feeds me, it eases my anxieties, it makes me breathe properly and slows my heart down. I enjoy following a books journey - from a conversation in a pub or at a gig or reading, to the proof copy, to the publication and seeing it in a shop window. Books take ages to be realised, from initial idea to finished object in your hand. We can never underestimate this, it is hard work to make an dream in the head into a picture in words and a solid thing that can be seen in the mind, read and shared.
And so here is a list of top ten books, a list of go-to favourite reads, a list that is constantly changing even as I write it here, but I'll try, here goes.
Click here to discover Salena’s own novels.
I will return to this book time and time again, it is a piece of magic.
2. Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye
I recently re-read this when Toni had passed away. What a beautiful book and phenomenal author she was, she was a powerhouse and a giant and a trailblazer. Read the entire back catalogue and weep.
3. Elizabeth Smart - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept
I think this book was way ahead of its time. It is all things, poetry, prose, love and grief and fury, it is a book I re-read often and it is excellent.
4. Richard Brautigan - So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away
A pure book of poetic memoir, it is a dream to read and hold and love all the work by Brautigan. I thin I own everything by Brautigan, he is one of my many heroes. His daughter Ianthe Brautigan published a brilliant memoir You Can't Catch Death, it is a powerful book, and brilliant insight into his life and work and suicide.
5. Jean Rhys - Good Morning Midnight
Jean Rhys never got her dues as a young woman and as a mixed-race writer. I like the earlier 1930's novels best, but she is better known for Wide Sargasso Sea which she wrote later in life. I love Jean's 1930's Paris and London and her depictions of poverty, hunger, hedonism, sexism, racism, longing and desperate times. It is very sad work but absolutely sublime. After reading 1930's Paris through the male gaze of Miller, Celine, Hemingway, Orwell etc. Jean gives us us a female voice of early twentieth century Paris and this is vital.
6. Carson McCullers - The Ballad of The Sad Cafe
Phenomenal author and one of my life long favourites, hard to choose which novel I like best but have chosen this one because it is so profoundly beautiful. I also really love the work of Flannery O'Connor and other deep south US authors like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. They are all in a set in my head, for hot summer afternoons they read like cool lemonade.
7. David Seabook - All The Devils Are Here
This book is so strange and dark and haunting. I think it moves me because it is all set in Kent and Sussex where I was born and grew up. This cult classic is the oddest and most disturbing of works. I love it.
8. Hubert Selby Junior - Last Exit To Brooklyn
Possibly the first novel that made me want to write or the first book that gave me license to write. I read it when I was a teenager and it changed my relationship with books and writing and story telling forever.
Classic memoir by the great Burroughs. This book contains the truth.
10. Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf In Manhattan
I love Maggie Gee. The books she creates are so inventive, imaginative and beautifully crafted. The latest book is Blood is also brilliant, but I have a soft spot for this book in particular, imagining Virginia Woolf in modern times, it is pure genius.