Top Five Saturday: Books over Five Years Old

There are so many plays by Euripides I could have chosen from: I adore Medea in particular, but the Bacchae is archetypal for me.

The conflict between male and female, rational and irrational, divine and mundane. All wrapped up in beautiful muscular language.

Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, has come to Thebes, and the women are streaming out of the city to worship him on the mountain, drinking and dancing in wild frenzy.

Beautiful and mad and hilarious and tragic. What more could you want? Again, that conflict between the human knight striving to live by a rational code of chilvalry, coming face to face (head to head) with the other – in this case a green giant who strolls away after his head has been struck off!

His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered – and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

Without doubt the most powerful and lyrical and elemental – the most mythic – of Shakespeare’s plays. Ruined kings, impish fools, violence and blasted heaths, madness and horror.

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport.”

Mythic. Monumental. Iconic. It goes without saying that Frankenstein remains a central figure haunting so much of literature. It was such a tough choice between the gothic texts but the power of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein is testimony to how potent Shelley’s original remains.

An insane rambling stewing pot of a novel: by turns lyrical, absurd, horrific; at times prose, drama and verse. Extravagant metaphors; philosophical depth. Shakespearean in its language as much as it is in its characterisation: Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, Pip…

Sensual, erotic, horrific.

As with the list above, the enduring power of this series of short stories lies in its interweaving of the real and unreal, the macabre and the mundane. All the stuff which makes up the fairytales which she so brilliantly twists here.

From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Gorgeously written, beautifully constructed, powerfully created characters… Wolf Hall is a masterpiece and to be able to create such a vivid and fresh novel from such a familiar historical period – I’m sure there are statistics but surely the Tudor period has been mined more than any other – is phenomenal.

England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor.

Apologies that the link is to Bring Up The Bodies, the second in the trilogy, but I’d read this before the blog began!

Again, we are returning to similar words, aren’t we? Mythic. Muscular. Lyrical.

This tale of a young boy, Conor O’Malley, coming to terms with his mother’s cancer and increasingly inevitable death is heart breaking at so many levels.

Ignore the Young Adult label and shelving: this is a beautiful book that everyone should read.

This was my first ever Kate Atkinson and it is wonderful! Ursula Todd, born again and again, learning from each life, is wonderful and the evocations of place and time are perfection.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

Of all Smith’s books, this is probably my favourite – oh but the Seasonal Quartet! It is delicate, and passionate and beautiful.

A fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.