THE 2015 BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE FOR COMIC FICTION

I don't like depressing books. Misery lit leaves me cold. The reason I put off reading Anna Karenina for nearly thirty years was because I assumed Russian novels would be awfully gloomy, on account of all the snow and vodka and endless numbers of characters. I had a huge Hardy binge as a teenager, when I was still blithe enough to sail past fictional tragedies unscathed but reached field level as I was about to begin Jude the Obscure and there it has glowered on the bookshelf, unread, ever since,  bleakly telegraphing a literary 'Keep Out' sign. 

Left to my own devices, I have a marked preference for books where the good end happily and the bad unhappily. Or perhaps, if the bad really can't bring themselves to end unhappily, then at least repentantly.  But above all, I like a novel that makes me laugh. Things that are simultaneously bleak and funny - like Down and Out in Paris and London - or have a peculiarly British blend of pathos and wit  - Lissa Evans' Crooked Heart and Nina Stibbe's Man at the Helm - have me at the opening page.  I like comedies of manners - Mitford and Pym and E.F Benson. I like my humour mordant too -  I love Muriel Spark no less for thinking she occasionally spills over into spite. I like the imaginative silliness of Terry Pratchett, the sharp satire of Waugh's Scoop and Decline and Fall, or Malcolm Bradbury's History Man, or Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey. And I adore the straightforward blissful good-natured funniness of P.G Wodehouse. Real Life can be such a trudge, if one's going to escape into a novel, it ought to make the effort to be cheering. 

But, reader, it seems The Modern Novel must be gritty to have critical attention lavished upon it. Books in which terrible things happen to perfectly good people become the critic's darlings as if there's a secret points system for gloom, the literary equivalent of being selected for a free coffee at Pret A Manger. Praise is not reserved for the most-recently published - doom-love is backdatable: Stoner, written in 1965, became 2013's  'best-book-you've-never-heard-of, its author John Williams unleashes a catalogue of minor and unremitting disappointments on its hero without a glimmer of redemption. (I'll confess, despite its lack of laughs, I loved Stoner, and today is the 50th anniversary of its first publication: if you haven't read it, do, and if you have, have a listen to this excellent podcast)

Anyway, fortunately for all fans of amusing books, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, now in its 15th year, is determined to reward authors for being a tonic, and to celebrate the great British tradition - epitomised by Wodehouse - of comic fiction. On Monday evening, I went to a lovely party at The Goring which marked the publication of the 99th and final book in the Everyman Collected Wodehouse series, and also allowed the great and the good to raise a glass to the shortlisted authors for this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

Sir Edward Cazelet, Wodehouse's literary executor talking about the literary legacy of his step-grandfather, here with  Everyman's David Campbell

Lovely John Franklin, Communications Director for Bollinger, resplendent in blues and greens, giving a very elegant speech about Bollinger's support for the prize for comic fiction.

Bollinger, and Wodehouse (marvellous combination) and one of Andrzej Klimowski's illustrations: all 99 books in the collection have his marvellous pictures

The six shortlisted novels are Nina Stibbe’s Man at the Helm, Helen Lederer’s Losing It,Alexander McCall Smith’s Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party, Irvine Welsh’s A Decent Ride, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog, and Caitlin Moran’s How To Build a Girl. I haven't read the Welsh, McCall Smith or O'Neill, and whilst I liked How To Build a Girl very much, I'm rooting for Nina Stibbe - Man at the Helm is as wickedly funny as the author herself, with brilliant moments of bathos, and, having met the utterly charming Helen Lederer at the party, I know Losing It is a treat in store. 

Nina Stibbe, shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Man at the Helm, and guest at The Books That Built Me last autumn and Rachel Johnson, whose latest novel, Fresh Hell, is published in June and who will be a guest at the Books That Built Me in the summer.

With Helen Lederer, possessor of the most exquisite turquoise eyes you've ever seen, and author of Losing It, which I'm dying to read

The winner will be announced at the Hay Literary Festival in May, and gets a lot of Bollinger and Everyman editions of Wodehouse and a Gloucester Old Spot named after them. I think it would be rather fun to host a literary salon about funny novels -perhaps in a similar format to The Books That Built Me, but with three authors of comic fiction, each talking about the book that makes them laugh the most.

 Let me know what you think of that idea, and in the meantime, there are just two tickets left for The Books That Built Me with Lissa Evans, herself shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Their Finest Hour and A Half and it won't be giving too much away to say that comic fiction will play its part in our discussion about her favourite books.  

THE JILLY COOPER CURE

Imogen, my first Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper is my universal panacea - whenever the sky looks like it's falling in, I duck into one of her novels and shelter there for a while (rather than bolt off to tell the King like Henny Penny - the flight or fight instinct is not strong in me - I'm all about the hiding). I re-read Riders, Rivals, Polo, Imogen, Emily, Harriet, Octavian, even the lesser Jilly's of Jump! Score! and Wicked! (Let the exclamation mark be a warning sign) until I feel I can tackle whatever has sent me scuttling.

The comfort of Cooper has, of course, a lot to do with the way she writes within a conventional literary framework, rather than challenging it, and even when things look bleak for her characters, we know that the wheel of fortune will turn upwards again for them. Her language underpins this narrative certainty - things are larky, merry, jaunty - and one reads on, secure in the knowledge that the good will end happily and the bad unhappily, because, to quote Wilde, 'that is what Fiction means', at least in the cosy world of Cooper.

As a teenager, two authors kicked down the door to the magical, infinite riches offered by books: TS Eliot's The Waste Land was a poem which came with a free gift of a literary education, a Grand Tour of Western Culture, books upon which all sorts of other books are built: Dante and Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, The Bible and Baudelaire, Ovid and Virgil - an intellectual paradise. But Jilly Cooper took me to the books that nourish and sustain the soul - through her I discovered Nancy Mitford, Barbara Pym, Forever Amber, The Diary of A Provincial Lady, Cold Comfort Farm, Barbara Comyns, Mary Webb, Austen and Trollope. In her voice, in her characters and in her plots you sense the blissful influence of these writers, and if occasionally Cooper's love for them seeps into her writing a little too literally - a character in Harriet, confronted with a bawling, teething child, suggests it should go to the dentist and Red Alderton, in Polo, is given to sporting brightly coloured jackets, piped with a contrasting braid, both of which echo Cedric in The Pursuit of Love - it's more as a musician might use a sample than anything else, a reminder of her references, staking her claim to a particular literary tradition. 

But it's not simply Cooper's voice that led me down a primrose path of literary dalliance - she uses literary quotation to as a shortcut to describe character better than any other writer I can think of - sexy, temperamental, irresistible Rory Balniel is Young Lochinvar, you know Polo's Luke Alderton is a thoroughly good egg because he reads poetry - Martin Fierro and Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Declan O'Hara, Rival's charismatic, irascible, tragic-romantic hero's great love is Yeats: he whispers to his faithless wife 'there is grey in your hair, Young men no longer catch their breath, When you are passing' and the quote so cleverly captures the drama of their relationship, I had my head stuck in Yeat's Collected Works for months afterwards. Cooper doesn't only feed the quote habit of her male characters - literary women abound, and nor is literariness a universal indicator of goodness in a character - Helen, Rupert Campbell-Black's first wife is given to earnest quoting as a sign both of her pretension and also a signifier of the mismatch in the relationship between her and Rupert, who believes reading anything other than Horse and Hound a monumental waste of time.

So, for thirty years, Cooper has sustained me, and brought me enormous pleasure, not only with her own books but with those to which she's introduced me. If T.S Eliot and Jilly Cooper are my formative literary experiences, and if what you read can't help but rub off onto what you write, then heaven help the Great Unfinished Novel ...

LIBERTY LONDON GIRL & THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME AT CHISWICK BOOK FESTIVAL

The Books That Built Me with Liberty London Girl 13th September 2014

On Saturday 13th September at 7pm, Sasha Wilkins, founder of LibertyLondonGirl.com, and I will be at the Chiswick Book Festival for a special Books That Built Me salon to celebrate the forthcoming launch of her first book, Friends Food Family.

I first came across Sasha when I had just begun to write Mrs Trefusis Takes A Taxi and Sasha's legendary blog was the, then anonymous, account of the ex-pat life of a British magazine editor, working, living, dining and dating in New York. Liberty London Girl became a synonym for smart, single, stylish and savvy - insights into the arcane world of fashion mixed with amusing anecdotes about the New York dating scene alongside musings and meditations about food and friends. Above all, it was Sasha's warm, wise and generous personality that made her a star in the brave new blogging firmament.

A little over six years later, the online world has evolved: Sasha has left the traditional world of magazine publishing and anonymous blogging behind to build a successful dotcom business in LibertyLondonGirl.com, with a powerful social media voice and readers in 139 countries world-wide. What's more, her love of bringing people together over food and good conversation has resulted into what promises to be a best-selling cookery book: small wonder You magazine has pounced on the exclusive serialisation rights (I think this starts a week Sunday). Sasha is living proof that following one's passions is the secret to success.

In those early days, when blogging was quite new, and twitter a minority interest, Sasha and I bonded over our love of books - a mutual, raging passion for Georgette Heyer, obsessive re-reading of I Captured the Castle, and so on. Her online support for Mrs Trefusis, and her subsequent actual Real Life friendship, is something I value very highly. It's also fair to say The Books That Built Me wouldn't exist without Sasha - the idea has its seeds in a long conversation she and I had on a wet and windy day in 2012  about the way books bring women together, and how childhood favourites sustain one in adult life.

Anyway, having watched Sasha's extraordinary trajectory from fashion editor of The Wall Street Journal-AKA-anonymous-blogger to a bonefide dotcommer and author of a brilliantly useful book, I'm absolutely delighted she's going to share her thoughts about her journey with the help of the books that have inspired her and informed her along the way.

Sasha Wilkins, of LibertyLondonGirl.com, talks about the books that have built her on 13th September at the Chiswick Book Festival. Tickets are available here and include a copy of Harper's Bazaar and entry into a prize draw to win fabulous treats from Nyetimber, Ralph Lauren and Le Creuset.

Also at the Chiswick Book Festival is previous Books That Built Me guest, Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, in his hugely entertaining one-man show, 'Read Y'self Fitter'.

Friends Food Family, by Sasha Wilkins is published on 25th September by Quadrille, priced £18.99

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ANDY MILLER

Andy Miller & I at The Club at Cafe Royal and his chosen 'Books That Built Me'

The last Books That Built Me salon with Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, went so delightfully well, I'm ashamed it's taken me so long to write the experience up. I have no excuse for my tardiness, other than reading Andy's book so rekindled my own  

 passion for books, I've have had my head stuck in a succession of novels ever since, some improving, some not so much.

Andy Miller's Books That Built Me took place, as ever, at The Club at Café Royal, which has welcomed the great and the good of London's literary set since Oscar Wilde was a regular in the Grill Room. In a lovely coincidence, I discovered Wilde (reputedly) wore Hammam Bouquet, the first scent created by Penhaligon's, who support The Books That Built Me and give the lovely fragrance libraries that guests get in their goodybags. I have a deeply superstitious side, and in the spirit of making a kind of burnt offering to the ghost of Oscar Wilde, willing him give the salon his benediction from the other side, Penhaligon's very kindly gave me Elixir candles to scent the room, a decadent contemporary take on Hammam Bouquet, all exotic spices, incense and old libraries with leather bound books.

The Year of Reading Dangerously is about a man whose life has been built of, and on, books. It's all about the beautiful truth every book lover understands: books not only have the power to open up the world, but they also have a magical ability to open up one's understanding of oneself. They heal and nourish, delight and entertain. Yet as every bibliophile will also understand, the acquisition of books is an addiction - ownership of these enchanted objects leads inevitably to a large pile of unread books reproaching one from one's bedside table - as Miller writes in The Year of Reading Dangerously, 

“Books, for instance. I had a lot of those. There they all were, on the shelves and on the floor, piled up by the bed and falling out of boxes. Moby-Dick, Possession, Remembrance of Things Past, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, a few Pevsners, that Jim Thompson omnibus, The Child in Time, Six more Ian McEwan novels or novellas, two volumes of is short stories…. These books did furnish the room, but they also got in the way. And there were too many I was aware I had not actually read. As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, ‘It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them: but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.’

These books became the focus of a need to do something. They were a reproach – wasted money, squandered time, muddled priorities. I shall make a list I thought. It will name the books I am most ashamed not to have read – difficult ones, classics, a few outstanding entries in the deceitful Miller library – and then I shall read them.”

And so he did, as you'll discover if you read his book. But for the Books That Built Me, Andy and I talked about books he had already read and loved: here are the six Books That Built Andy Miller.

1.Moominpappa at Sea

“One afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else” Andy says Moominpappa perfectly describes his existential angst, his innate Eyore-ishness, what one of his favourite writers, Douglas Adams, calls 'the long dark teatime of the soul'. It's "a chronicle of a mid-life crisis foretold, for readers of nine and over.” I say, Andy Miller is a lot cheerier than he believes himself to be.

2. Absolute Beginners

"Absolute Beginners gave me an exit strategy, a teenage identity I could relate and aspire to. In the process, it liberated and liberalised me – awaked in me the nervous excitement of being young, on the brink, in the same way that great pop music does." 

3. The Whitsun Weddings

I wondered if Andy had chosen The Whitsun Weddings because Larkin is another self-confessed pessimist, like Moominpappa and Andy Miller. Perhaps there's some truth in that. Andy read Larkin's Arundel Tomb - and talked about how its most famous line 'what will survive of us is love' was entirely misinterpreted by Julian Barnes in A History of The World in Ten and a Half Chapters. Bold but fair, I thought.

4. A Rebours (Against Nature)

Oh, Andy Miller, mon semblable, mon frère....how fabulous to discover someone else who's actually read this marvellous book. Against Nature is a now rather obscure late nineteenth century novel about Des Esseintes, a world-weary, filthy rich, fin-du-siecle French aristocrat who leaves town for an isolated country house where he can indulge in a kaleidoscope of extreme sensual experiences – he has a black feast in which everything is ....black, he fills his house with symbolist art, he grows a garden of poisonous plants, he spends days trying to make the perfect perfume – he has exhausting sex with a lady athlete called Miss Urania – and there’s the tortoise, of course, which he encrusts with astonishing precious jewels so it can crawl exquisitely over his carpet. It expires under the weight of its beauty, logical conclusion of an aesthete's life.


Andy says it's one of the funniest books he's ever read, I say it's one of the most tragic: the truth is somewhere in between.

5. Anna Karenina 
Andy describes Anna Karenina as the perfect union of art and entertainment. I'm ashamed to admit that I'd owned a copy of Anna Karenina for nearly thirty years without ever having read it, thinking it might be enormously hard work. It isn't. I read it whilst swotting for Andy's Books That Built Me and it's every bit as miraculous as he says it is, gripping and nourishing in equal measure.

6. Tigers are Better Looking
Jean Rhys will be known to most only for her Jane Eyre prequel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, read by Andy during his reading odyssey for TYoRD - there's something immensely satisfying about discovering an author you love and then going on to read everything else they've written too.

Andy and I talking about Against Nature - in honour of the famous tortoise passage, I'm wearing Livyora's beautiful Tartarucha earrings, smoky quartz surrounded by diamonds in the shape of a tortoise

Like Andy Miller, I seemed also to have ..."forgotten the parquet floor, the boy sitting in the back seat, or stretched out on his bed on a summer’s day, lost and found in a good book… So far the List of Betterment had offered me glimpses of something bigger and better. It was up to me to keep looking for it, to push reality aside until I relocated the magic of reading." - hosting Andy's The Books That Built Me helped me completely relocate the magic of reading: for this, and for being such a marvellous and entertaining guest, I owe him quite a debt.

Guests went home with a goodybag containing a copy of Andy Miller's The Year of Reading Dangerously, a copy of Harper's Bazaar, a Penhaligon's Scent Library and a delicious bar of Prestat chocolate. 

Andy Miller's solo show 'Read Y'self Fitter', a ten step programme to cure yourself of bad reading habits (like not reading at all) is at the Chiswick Book Festival on Saturday 13th September. Tickets on sale now.
The Books That Built Me is also coming to the Chiswick Book Festival in a special salon with Sacha Wilkins of LibertyLondonGirl.com, in advance of the launch of her gorgeous book Food Friends Family:  tickets will be on sale next week.

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME: JULY 1ST: ANDY MILLER, THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY

'High Fidelity for bookworms' The Telegraph

The next Books That Built Me Salon will be on 1st July at 18.30 with Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.  

Infinitely more than 'High Fidelity for bookworms', catchy as that Telegraph pull-quote is, The Year of Reading Dangerously is an irreverent, witty and inspiring memoir in which Andy Miller, editor, writer and former bookseller, sets out to read the books he's claimed to have read, but never has. He prescribes himself a 'List of Betterment' of thirteen books, which soon swells to fifty-two, and creates a heroically methodical approach to getting through them - fifty pages a day, one word in front of the other, a sensible discipline designed to get one to the end of books which are far from readerly - Beckett's The Unnameables, The Communist Manifesto, The Ragged Trousered Philanthopists - as well as those which have a more conventional narrative pull - Anna Karenin, Middlemarch, for example. 

What I love about The Year of Reading Dangerously is that it's a thoughtful, engaging meditation on the nourishing pleasures of really great books, yet it's no Leavisite canon. It's true that what we might call classics form the backbone of the List of Betterment, but Miller's reading is eclectic and unashamedly no-brow: he explores Tolstoy and Austen in the same breath as Judith Kerr and Douglas Adams, and, in one of the book's triumphant set-pieces, there's a deftly written and vastly entertaining comparative reading of Moby Dick and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. 

The sub-title of The Year of Reading Dangerously is 'how fifty great books saved my life': one might argue that 'life-saving' is going a little far, but it's certainly life-changing: contained in its three hundred or so pages is its own complex and powerful theory of bibliotherapy. Good books come with the promise of metamorphosis, but in A Year of Reading Dangerously, it's not only books that have the power to change one, but the action of reading itself that effects the transformation. 

Inspired by The Year of Reading Dangerously, I've begun Anna Karenin, one of the many books whose presence on my bookshelf implies, quite wrongly, that I've read it already. Three days and one hundred and fifty pages in (see, sticking to the formula works), I'm already in thrall to what Miller describes as a book with "the perfect balance of art and entertainment - no, not a balance, a union of the two". For prompting me to read this extraordinary book, and his own, I'm very much looking forward to discussing with Andy Miller the Books That Built him. 

The Books That Built Me. 1st July, 18.30 to 20.30 at The Club at Café Royal. Tickets include a pre-event cocktail reception, a signed copy of the hardback edition, a copy of Harper's Bazaar and a Penhaligon's gift. 

By way of an addendum, I must confess that I have been at various points in my life an incorrigible liar about the books that I've read - I even wrote several excellent essays at university on books with which I had a less than intimate relationship, armed only with the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and a cursory flick through the first and last hundred pages. I'm no slouch when it comes to reading, but I have managed to convince myself, and others, that I have read more widely than I have: here are a few I'll readily admit to (yes, yes I know, great works of fiction in Playmobil - I was once bored in charge of  a tiny Trefusis Minor and these tableaux were the result)....

I've read the first fifty pages of the first book of A La Récherche du Temps Perdu, yet I can talk very intensely and, I feel, convincingly, about hawthorn, madeleines, memory, the kiss not given, Odette, Baron du Charlus etc etc. Here is Proust reading a copy of his own book and eating a giant madeleine in his famous cork-lined room.

Paradise Lost. Despite Milton being the subject of one of my greatest friend's books (Milton's Angels by Professor Joad Raymond), I've read the good bit with Satan in it and that's it. Do I need to read it? Probably. Am I dogged by guilt about not having read it? Definitely.

Julius Caesar. I can quote quite a lot of it. Not sure I feel I must read, rather than watch, Shakespeare, but you know, Et tu, Brute.....

Actually, I jolly well have read Beowulf. I've read it on several occasions and in several translations - the one to read is the blissful Seamus Heaney, rich and delicious with Heaney's ear for cadence and his love of the  'word hoard'.

SARAH CHURCHWELL & THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

Last Thursday evening, in the elegant setting of The Club at Café Royal, I played literary hostess to Sarah Churchwell, author of Careless People, Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, in the first of a series of salons called  The Books That Built Me.

The Books That Built Me is an idea borne of the belief that inside every book-lover is a memory-palace full of stories – tales of enchanted princesses and magical beasts, of smugglers, spies and buried treasure, stepmothers and boarding schools, something nasty in the woodshed, loves lost and found, vanquished enemies – perpetual summer holidays in other people’s imaginations. None of us is the book we’ve just read, we’re the sum of all the novels in our lives – the books that built us.

In a sense, that's is the inspiration for The Books That Built Me, but its catalyst was something I read in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s autobiography, Slipstream. She reminded me it’s not only readers who are built of books, but authors. Howard was, by virtue of her marriage to Kingsley Amis, stepmother to a teenage Martin Amis, who apparently read nothing but comics, Harold Robbins and ‘the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. He's about sixteen, I think, when she asks him what he wants to do when he’s older. ‘I'm going to be a writer, Jane’ he says. Howard stares at him, askance,

" ‘You – a writer? But you’ve never read anything. If you’re so interested in writing, why don’t you read? He looked at me and said ‘give me a book to read then.’ And I gave him Pride and Prejudice. " 

Howard goes onto give him a reading list that adds Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh, Green and Golding to Austen, and these are the books that built Amis into the author he aspired to be. 

So the purpose of The Books that Built Me is to bring to life a writer’s reading list, not an exhaustive one, but a sample of the books that have stayed with them, comforted or nourished them or informed them as a writer.  It's also a literary desert island discs, or as Sarah Churchwell put it so beautifully, 'how the books you love meet the books you write'.

The Club at Café Royal is an exceptionally chic and appropriate place in which to host a literary salon - the Café Royal’s reputation could be said to have been built on books, counting many literary greats as frequent visitors, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf amongst them. Virginia Woolf links the Café Royal to Harper’s Bazaar, for whose support I’m very grateful – Woolf wrote a number of short stories for Bazaar, never published outside the pages of the magazine until after her death. I’d also like to thank Penhaligons for scenting the room with their Juniper Sling, in homage to F Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite tipple, The Gin Rickey, and to Prestat for the delicious 'Art Deco' chocolate in the goody-bags, and to Carat* for lending me diamonds so I could feel properly swanky when up on stage.

The Club at Café Royal created a delicious Careless People cocktail for the evening -  a beautiful, jewel-coloured blend of vodka, plum sake, pomegranate juice and fresh lime juice, served in a cocktail coupe with a curl of orange zest: 'suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform....The party has begun'. 

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, quoted in Careless People in a chapter that so glitters with detail you step straight through a magic door into one of the real jazz-age parties that inspired those in Gatsby.

The Club at Café Royal is ordinarily only open to members. For enquiries please email membership@clubcaferoyal.com or telephone +44(0)207 406 3370

The Books That Built Sarah Churchwell
1.F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: subject of Careless People, her 'histoire trouvé'. Gatsby is, she tells us, the book that 'taught her how to read as a writer', a 'litmus test'
2.Andrew Lang's Fairy Books: Andrew Lang's fairy books are a compendium of every familiar and unfamiliar fairy story. 
3.Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy: screwball comedy meets Jane Austen. 
4. Willa Cather, My Antonia.
5. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises (with a nod to Eliot along the way, not so much for his being one of Sarah's desert island books, but because like Cather, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Eliot is another extraordinary writer that bubbled from the literary wellspring of the American Midwest: I'd add Sarah Churchwell to that list. Interestingly, Eliot, Hemingway and Fitzgerald all, like Sarah, migrated to Europe - only as expatriates were they able to write so eloquently about America. 
6. Careless People - the book, which as Harper's Bazaar wrote, 'will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about The Great Gatsby.' It's an exhilarating read and a stunning piece of scholarship, a unique literary biography which reconstructs in exquisite detail the year in which Fitzgerald set his finest novel. 

Careless People, Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of the Great Gatsby is published by Virago.

Follow Sarah Churchwell on twitter @sarahchurchwell - she is giving the London Library Lecture at the Hay Literary Festival on The American Dream - do go.

The next Books That Built Me will be on Tuesday 1st July. Details will be published next Wednesday, 28th May.

GUEST POST: 'ONE KEY THAT ALIGNS THEM ALL' by TREFUSIS MINOR [NOW WITH PART TWO ADDED]

Trefusis Minor is an enthusiastic writer of stories - I invited him to publish his latest - One Key That Aligns Them All - on my blog. Like many great authors, TM prefers to write long hand - I have typed it up for him and corrected the very few spelling mistakes, but it is in all other ways entirely unedited.

It was another day in my old life...or so I thought.

My father, Percy Jackson, sadly was a medic in the war. Good old man, he was, he had a coal black beard and a smile that filled you with joy. But on a dark, grim day, he got shot and was rushed back to London to get advanced medical care. No matter how much they tried, they could not save him, so with respect, all of his family gathered round my father's death bed and we said our goodbyes.

After a while, the family left, apart from one and that one was me, sobbing by my father's side until he took me by the arm and handed me something rather heavy. It was his notebook. It belonged to his father and his father before that. But it came with something a bit smaller; a key.

To describe in the best of words what the notebook looked like, it was a dark brown colour with metal branches and leaves as decoration, though it also had a piece of old parcel string wrapped around the middle. However, the key was an object rather different. It looked like some old golden church key hanging from a bright copper chain.
'Protect these with your life.' he said, and breathed his last.

Then my mother came in and told me it was time for me to go to bed. So she and I went to my bedroom. She blew out the candles, and left the room. A few minutes later, I jumped out of bed and threw open the curtains revealing the glowing moon. Then I swept across the room and grasped the notebook and turned to the front page. There was a line of thick black letters spelling,

'My name shall be your start:

I am a void, from which flows

Life, drop a copper into my head

And from there shall your wish be bred?'

That question was extremely challenging but thanks to my father's several riddles that he told when I was young, it was a breeze.

'The old wishing well, down at Old Sarum!' I cried with joy. So there I scurried as fast as I possibly could. When I arrived there, I ran straight to the old well and turned the page of the notebook. I leaned against the stone bricks and then I thought I saw a dark figure in the distance but I bet i imagined it. So I turned back and started reading again.

The next thing I knew, I had been pushed straight into the well. 'I can't go up, 'cause I'll just get shoved back in again. I can't go to my left or my right, so I shall have to go down.' I thought to myself.

So, there I went, I went deeper and deeper, darker and darker until, as if it were magic, the water finally ended and I found myself in deep undergrowth. So I went on, but then came from nowhere a dead end.

I sat down in despair, though just when my backside touched the ground, I heard a slight creak. It was a trapdoor! With a keyhole and everything.

I thought I'd try the key [which I had hung] around my neck but it had no use. Then I thought I saw something gleaming in the distance. I went to see what it could be - it couldn't hurt, could it? There I went, and what a coincidence, it was a lock-pick and bolt. I took them over to the trapdoor, because my father had shown me how to pick locks when once I was stuck in the downstairs kitchen.

It took several tries to pick the lock but at long last the trapdoor was open. Without looking, I jumped down and landed in something vine-like and smelling of dirt, but these were vines with a mangrove tree in the middle. I thought I was completely alone until I heard a deep croaky voice. I looked around to see who might be there. I could not see anyone so I asked a simple question: 'Who's there?' But this time the voice came directly from the tree so I went to have a look.

There was was no one to be seen. I asked one more time who was there but it was obvious now it was the tree who spoke. The vines grew around me; one already pinned me down. The tree spoke again, 'It is I who spoke, and I shall devour you.'

'Please, let's be reasonable,' I pleaded.

'Yes, of course, we will ask each other riddles. If you get one wrong, I will demolish you. If I get one wrong, I will let you live.'

So there we were, asking each other questions until he asked me a riddle I had never heard before;

'I devour trees, rocks, mountains, cities. I destroy planets. I crush humans and all other beings. What am I?'

It took several minutes and then the tree started growing its vines towards me. I tried to shout, 'Give me time!' but all that I could blurt out was 'Time! Time!'. The tree pulled back its vines and said 'Clever boy you are.'

'But....b... b...but,' I stammered, 'But - of course!'

'What do you mean? but of course?' He asked, 'Well, I guess it is none of my business. I have my duty to let you pass through the door as once I let another being.'

Before I could finish my investigations, the mangrove tree split into four wooden planks, one of which was booming down, throwing itself across the cave. Then there was oblivion.

When I got up, there was a nearly blinding light from the middle of the swampy cavern, gleaming like it was about to explode into a frenzy of flames. But as I got up, it started to slowly fade away into nearly complete darkness!

Though I hadn't noticed it before, I was lying on a bony corpse! I threw myself away in disgust and saw there was more to the corpse than there seemed. There were several pellets and a gun beside him, lying there, stiff and peaceful...

[Arrgghh - just as things were getting even more exciting, it appears Trefusis Minor has gone off for his sleepover with Les Jumeaux, neglecting to give me the remaining pages. I will collar him as soon as he is back and type up the rest. So, One Key That Aligns Them All is to be serialised, it seems, on Mrs Trefusis, rather than published in its entirety.....]

26th January: Greatly encouraged by being told he has 'great story-telling' and is reminiscent of the great Rider Haggard (which TM found immensely flattering once I'd reminded him who Rider Haggard was), we have Part Two, which I am instructed to write up below]

.... I slipped the pellets into my pocket and grabbed the gun by the sling and threw it over my back. As I turned, I saw a beautiful stone, covered in amazingly colourful gems. I approached it with astonishment, and there it was again, the nearly blinding light, this time coming from the face of the stone.

I walked towards it with extreme caution, then seeing, unlike the other parts of the stone, a smooth, dark key-hole, inside a golden slab, nestling in its centre. I took the key from around my neck and tried it in the lock. Miraculously, the key fitted and slid effortlessly in, but the moment it turned, I heard a slight crack and then a thunderous rumble of stones falling down from either side of the gloomy underworld. Dozens of mythical beasts jumped from the dark, shadowy tunnels made by the crumbling rocks and leapt towards me.

I gripped the musket I had taken from the skeleton and loaded it with the pellets. I pulled my penknife from my pocket and flicked out the blade. I stabbed a minotaur straight in the stomach as it was rushing towards me wielding a giant battle-axe. I shot a harpy right in the middle of her terrifying forehead with a pellet from the musket. She went howling across the undergrowth, knocking my musket straight out of my fist.

I had only two weapons left: my penknife and my lock-pickers bolt. Another minotaur galloped at me. I reached for him and ripped the ring from its nose but he hit me back with his huge fists, kocking me to the ground, jumping on me until he stopped; I had stabbed him straight in the lungs. I ran up, finding an orc swinging his hammer to knock me senseless, I leaped onto his back and gouged my bolt straight into his gullet, killing him instantly.

I saw my chance; a crack had appeared in the cave wall. I rushed towards it, leaving everything behind except the key clutched in my hand. Slipping straight through the crack, I heard an exploding boom from the cave behind me - but I did not want to turn back to that terrifying place.

I collapsed, exhausted, onto the ground, but at that moment, I found it was not solid rock beneath me but grass. It seemed almost impossible to finally breath fresh, frosty air; I was in a garden, but something seemed to me suspicious.....[to be continued...]

Restaurants. The Man of Property. Dr Luca Russo.

21st January

Managing to limp through January without The Wolseley, closed for a refurb of the kitchens. Now it's closed, I can't think of anywhere else to eat that I like,  a bit like when you know you have vegetarians coming to dinner and you can't for the life of you think of anything to cook that doesn't involve meat. I like the simple predictability of The Wolseley, its excellent coffee and the way there is always someone interesting to look at (I'm not talking about celebrities). I find I'm rather conservative in my choice of restaurants- I hate anywhere too cheffy, or where the food wears a tin hat and has a poem read to it by a waiter before you're permitted to eat it. Perhaps I'm like old James Forsyte in Galsworthy's The Man of Property -

In the upper room at french's, where a Forsyte could still get heavy English food, James and his son were sitting down to lunch.  Of all eating places, James liked best to come here.  There was something unpretentious, well-flavoured and filling about it and, though he had been to a certain extent corrupted by the necessity of being fashionable, and the trend of habits keeping pace with an income that would increase, he still hankered in quiet city moments after the tasty fleshpots of his earlier days.

I'm reading The Man of Property now - it's the first book I remember seeing at my parent's house, and I can't think why it's taken me this long to pick it up, it's utterly marvellous. Galsworthy is such a deft plotter and so precise with character. Within the first couple of hundred words, someone remarks - a propos of nothing - that she believes Irene has asked Soames for separate rooms, and immediately you know this is a marriage in trouble. Soames, the Man of Property, holds possessions dear - like all Forsytes, ownership is the central tenet of his life - he thinks Irene is his property, but realises the futility of trying to possess her. What is masterly is Galsworthy's resistance to offering the reader anything other than a Forsyte point of view, and it's this and its satire that makes it so compelling and thoughtful.  Is Galsworthy - a Nobel prize winner - now a much underrated and neglected writer? It seems to me that if you're neither a Victorian realist nor a Modernist, you get trapped in the cracks of The Canon - Ford Maddox Ford is another such, and he is brilliant - Parade's End quite the best book I've ever read.

22nd January

I visit Graham the hair God for re-blonding. He took me back to my natural auburn at my urging last year but Mr Trefusis loathed it, only ever having known me as a blonde, and didn't hesitate to tell me so. At first, everytime he said he hated it, I would have it dyed a more vivid red to provoke him, but that stopped being fun, so I'm bowing to pressure and Graham will have to start again. He has done, as ever, a tremendous job - I'm now a kind of Venetian blonde - there's enough red in there to remind me of what I once was, but it's blonde enough to appease Mr Trefusis.

23rd January

Horribly late as ever. I have a busy day, but am lunching - at a fashionable restaurant rather than a tasty fleshpot unfortunately - with the inestimable Dr Luca Russo, so he can inspect his work on my face (a little Botox which I think is way too subtle for my liking) and the effects of the fraxel (fresher, I think). I hope he pronounces me 'marvellous'.

BEER AND CLOTHING

Cast your minds back if you will, dear readers, to the mid eighties. For those of you who were only tiny tots, you'll just have to use your imaginations. Britain is in the grip of Thatcherism, the Miners Strike is drawing to a close, and I have Billy Bragg's EP Between the Wars playing on a loop on my Sony Walkman. Any telephone conversations too private to conduct in the hallway at home take place in red telephone boxes, endlessly pushing 2p's into the slot as you hear the frantic beeps indicating you're running out of money. No one has heard of email, and there is one computer in the whole school, so precious it has its own room, and only A'Level maths pupils are allowed near it.

Every inch the right-on New Romantic in my winklepickers and 'vintage' great coat adorned with CND badges, open to reveal my Katherine Hamnett '58% Don't Want Pershing' t-shirt, I march up to a door on a relatively middle-class housing estate and knock on the door.

'Hello,' I say, politely, 'I'm canvassing on behalf of the Conservative Party'. This being Oxton ward and not Rock Ferry, I don't have the door slammed in my face, although the harassed mother, pushing her curious children back inside the house, does say rather quizzically 'You don't look like a Conservative' before accepting my leaflet and waving me on.

Quite true. I didn't look like a conservative. I wasn't one. I dressed my politics. Being far too young to vote, or to have a mortgage or pay tax, I had Convictions. I was deeply on the side of right not Right, and very proud of my militant connections, though these were only my cousin's husband, Lecturer in Trade Union Studies at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and the fact my other cousin had once been to Greenham Common.

You may have spotted some contradiction here. Why was I canvassing for the Conservatives whilst carrying a copy of Marx for Beginners in my pocket? The truth, dear friend, is terribly simple: Sex. Or romance, really, if you're feeling faint-hearted.

This being an unsophisticated decade, and not awfully yoof-friendly, there were very few places to go for the enthusiastic teenager to meet members of the opposite sex. Church was out, naturally - far too much chastity and singing - so that left politics. I simply couldn't bring myself to fancy anyone with from the Young Socialists, all dirty-fingernails, Real Ale, irritable vowel syndrome, and making you go Dutch on everything.

I'm afraid that then, as now, I fancied Tory Boys. I preferred them with a small 't', since I was much less interested in their politics than the fact they tended to have an allowance, access to their mother's car, decent manners and nice clothes. I probably should never have been allowed to watch Brideshead Revisited, since it seemed to have imprinted a 'type' upon me at an impressionable age but certainly it left me with the idea that the working-class hero wasn't going to work for me. Tory boys weren't deeply trendy, but then, life was ever a compromise and I have a passion for posh.

Nor did I admire the dreary sincerity of the Young Socialists: their meetings were full of earnest discussions about society and they talked a lot of politics. The Young Conservatives Association didn't bother with anything so obvious: apart from wandering about with a few leaflets come the council elections, I don't remember politics coming into it at all. Oh, except once, when in a wave of enthusiasm we had a debate: I stood against the motion, This House Wholeheartedly Supports the Nuclear Deterrent, and I won in a resounding victory, rustling up a little support for Conservatives against the Bomb in the process. On the whole, going to the Young Conservative meetings meant drinks, idle chat, illicit cigarettes and the promise of a Saturday disco.

In retrospect, I do wonder why they let me hang out with them, given that I was as volubly anti-Thatch as Ben Elton, and literally wore my opinions on my sleeve, given my predilection for slogan badges. I think they were simply too polite, and too middle-class to mention the elephant in the room, enthusiastically waving a red flag. Possibly I had novelty factor. Certainly, I enjoyed trying to shock them with my subversive opinions, and it gave me a nice warm feeling of contrariness which is always pleasing when you're 16 and full of yourself.

As a dating strategy, it was a great success. The tory boys had frightfully nice manners, and conducted themselves chivalrously, hugely in favour of making sure you had a seat and buying you a drink. They also took the trouble to properly chat you up before getting sweaty-palmed and pouncy during a slow dance to Careless Whisper. Good snoggers without exception, they'd had evidently taken an O'level in undoing bras with one hand. And these being more innocent times, seemed content with an above the waist and below the knee diktat. I still get slightly quivery when I think about the rough border terrier feel of a tweedy tory boy embrace and the hot steamy smell of damp wool rising from sports jacket during an enthusiastic tussle in the front seat of a VW Golf.

I think my appeal lay in the allure of the transgressive, of snogging outside one's postcode. A date with me looked like rebellion particularly since I made great show of reading The Guardian and Cosmopolitan in an entirely fictitious attempt to look liberated and sexually enlightened.

Nearly a quarter of a century on, the placards and badges long since consigned to the dustbin of history, I only read The Guardian online, and never open Cosmo, and my political opinions have mellowed to a point where they're not even brought out for dinner parties. As I watch Mr Trefusis leave for work, dressed in a very snappy suit and an Hermes tie, all properly polished shoes, good cuff-links and an innate knowledge of the correct use of the apostrophe, I realise that I've never quite outgrown the appeal of tory boy chic.

PS: Mr Trefusis would have you know that it's not that I like the politics, I just like the floppy hair and the well-cut clothes....

A LA RÉCHERCHE DES VACANCES PERDUES

'I've turned into my parents, haven't I?' I said to Mr Trefusis halfway through our holiday, as I tuned the car radio into Radio Four and suggested we might stop to have a look at the view. I found myself parroting phrases like 'Just in case' and 'You can't trust the forecast' as I packed cagoules and cardigans, sunhats and suncream, and insisted on the children getting out to the beach even when it was far from warm for 'a bit of a blow'. Worse still, every time anyone yawned, I said 'Tires you out, all this sea air'. It's true: it does.

The piéce de résistance of my search for early eighties authenticity was dragging the tirelessly good-humoured Belgian Waffling down to the beach in a howling gale so we could enact the time-honoured British Tea Ceremony, Holiday Edition. I think we managed one cup each from the outsize thermos and a scone, crunchy with wind-whipped sand, before the charm wore off, but it evoked the requisite nostalgie de la boue. The only way we could possibly have trumped the experience would have been to drink the tea in the car whilst watching the sea and the lashing rain. But I think you have to be in Filey for it to work properly. I spent several summers as a child on the North East coast, and apparently I used to go swimming quite happily - God knows how I avoided hypothermia.

Even Mr Trefusis - who, like the Bromsgroves, came from a family that went Abroad for their holidays - fell for the charms of lovely Ventnor, even if he spent most of it pretending to be Alain Delon, hanging out in a fishing village somewhere on the Cote D'Azur.

Steephill Cove, our nearest beach, is the Petit Trianon of the British seaside. Tiny as it is, and accessible only by foot or by boat, it manages to boast not only the kind of rockpool action beloved of the Cappuccino Classes but also two of the best fish restaurants on the island, and café-cum-shop selling a mean espresso, Minghella's ices and cool retro sweets like Starbars, Fry's Mint Cream and Sherbet dibdabs. I muttered something about it being the new Dorset, and took Trefusis Minor and The TT down to the shoreline to build sandcastles and swim in the sea, leaving Mr Trefusis to 'watch' us from his favourite table, whilst simultaneously reading one of those 'The Girl with ..' novels and taking surreptitious peeks around his sun specs at the pretty girls coming in and out of the café.

Yet it wasn't all about trying to recapture the holidays of my childhood - as The Waffle's charming brother said as he took us all out on a boat, it's about making new memories too, even if some of them are inspired by old ones. 'I'll never forget the first time my dad took me fishing.' he said, as the mackerel lines were passed around. Fishing for mackerel off the coast of the Isle of Wight is infinitely more satisfying than catching crabs - the little blighters jump with lemming-like enthusiasm onto your hooks, and even The Tiniest Trefusis caught three, first time she dropped her line over the side. Trefusis Minor was less successful - he's more likely to remember his valiant attempts not to be seasick. We caught twenty-five mackerel in about ten minutes - and took them back to the lovely holiday house and baked some en papillotte with cider and onions, and froze the rest to take home after the holidays.

This morning, before leaving for the office, I made Mr Trefusis some mackerel pâté with the last of them (not as goddessy as it sounds - it's an insanely easy recipe, involving nothing more trying than mashing the ingredients together with a fork). I took the cooked fish off the bone by hand and as I sat on the bus on my way to work, I couldn't help noticing how appallingly whiffy my fingers still were, despite washing them several times. Ick.

Mackerel-scented fingers are too prosaic as a memory trigger and can hardly compete with Proust's madelines for romance, but all the same, I spent the whole journey wrapped in the comforting memories of a blissful fortnight spent in wonderful company, rediscovering simple pleasures.