Simon Winchester's Reading List

"Nebraska is the quintessential Great Plains state. If you drive across America, or go by train, you hurry through it as fast as you can and think it is no more than grass lands and corn fields. You think there is very little else except for one big city on the eastern side, Omaha – where, incidentally, America’s richest man, Warren Buffett, lives. Two great rivers dominate the state, the North Platte and the Missouri. I have become fascinated with the internals, as it were, of Nebraska. I love the fact that the great migratory routes – the Oregon trail and the Mormon migrations – all passed through it. There is an enormous sandstone pinnacle in the far west of Nebraska called Chimney Rock, a landmark which you can see from 30 miles. It remains unchanged from the times it was a real landmark, over 100 years ago. To me, Nebraska is a fantastically interesting crossroads, and a place where the east-west journeying of America is at its apex. You see the quintessence of pioneering in Nebraska. Willa Cather, who was born there but spent most of her writing life in New York City, felt a keen sense of nostalgia for the very hardscrabble life in the early pioneering days in Nebraska, and has written several books. I think she is one of the greatest of all American women writers. It is difficult to choose a favourite book of hers, but if I had to choose it would be O Pioneers! It’s an extraordinary story of a Swedish family who stepped over the frontier that I was talking about into this raw, untouched and very harsh land. There was no habitation, no cities, roads or anything. You had to start from scratch. They would build sod houses, begin to grow things, raise animals and see whether they could survive through a hard winter. And then they met other people and there was a market, and then came children. “I think she is one of the greatest of all American women writers.” Yes. It is quite extraordinary to see the formation of an American community. You find out about the lives and loves that define that community, and ultimately the crime. There is a famous murder under a mulberry tree. Tremendously so. Of course, it answers to a degree the deep and sincerely felt godliness of Americans. God was all they had to trust, because all the elements of nature worked against them so all they could do was pray and hope for the best. Most of them ultimately survived, got through and succeeded. So a toughness, determination, ambition and underlying godliness very much marks the Midwestern life in America, even to this day."

"This book begins in a similar way to O Pioneers! , with a hardscrabble farm in the same part of the world. It was set at the end of the 19th century and has nothing to do with being stoned. A lot of people think, “This is a novel about drugs.” It is not at all! It is about a young man, William Stoner, who goes off to university at great financial cost and deprivation to his father, who is a pioneer farmer. The boy goes off to agricultural college and this is seen as a great triumph. But while he is there he encounters literature for the first time, specifically a Shakespearian sonnet, and is transformed by reading it. He decides he doesn’t want to study agriculture at all, and we see him become a professor of literature. It is tempting to think that this is an academic novel with all its trials and tribulations, but it is not that either. It is a much more tender thing. It is a novel based essentially on disappointment, because Stoner has a rotten marriage and a terrible time academically. But he carries on and develops an intense affection for his now much more modest life. It is a story of intellectual determination and the ability of a man to find love simply in what he does. It is a book about love of learning. I don’t want to give it all away, but he does find true love with a woman towards the end of his life, so in the end there is great blessing and happiness. To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. It is very little known but anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. I do, to be perfectly honest. There are novels which show some ossification of social stratification in America, and in cities like Boston it is rampant. But generally I would say that there is a lot more social mobility in this country than in Britain. It is one of the reasons why I find there is a much greater degree of opportunity for someone like me than back in my home country of the UK. I have become a citizen of the United States, and while I am in no way disdainful of Britain and enormously affectionate of it, I am pleased that I am an American."

"In a way this is an expansion of the theme in Stoner , once again set in a university. It is a novel mainly about friendship and suffering. It is very sad, beginning with the death of one of the protagonists and how it ends is incredibly touching. Wallace Stegner is known as the great western novelist and is famous for books about Montana and the crossing of the west, most notably a novel called Angle of Repose which is an absolute classic. But in terms of human tenderness I find this particular book remarkable and unforgettable. Yes, they are very different indeed. The differences between them are reflected particularly in the Vermont chapter, where all sorts of bizarre things happen during a walk in the woods. What I really love about this novel is the depth of friendship which crossed between these couples from very different classes, who are on the one hand academic failures and on the other academic successes."

"Yes, there is no Winesburg, Ohio. Most people think it is based on Sherwood Anderson’s home town in Ohio, called Clyde. It is the most remarkable novel, written in 1919 so I think we are going to see some publicity when it celebrates its centenary. Once again, rather like Stoner , it dropped out of circulation for long periods. It was very modern and groundbreaking for its time, an entirely new form of writing. He draws about 20 portraits of people who lived in this mythical town. Most of them are seen through the eyes of a local newspaper reporter, a chap called George Willard. He calls the people “grotesques”. That is his word in 1919, but as with many English words things change subtly over the years – a better word to describe them now would be “eccentrics”. These are eccentrics that look for their own truths from whatever they were doing in the town, but they became very odd in their quests for those truths. All of the people in it are very peculiar and have strange stories. But taken as a whole, the portrait of this little town is unforgettable and wonderful and I commend it to anyone. You could see a novel like Main Street by Sinclair Lewis as being a great portrait of an American small town. But you see small towns in a much more impassioned way through the eyes of these grotesques, as reported by George Willard. “These days there is the scourge of political correctness. Things like television and Walmart and the unifying forces of modern America reduce this eccentricity that was once a motif, particularly of these small towns.” Yes, although much more then than now. These days there is the scourge of political correctness. Things like television and Walmart and the unifying forces of modern America reduce this eccentricity that was once a motif, particularly of these small towns. I think things are becoming more standard. I am writing a book at the moment which looks at the idea of the United States of America. I look at how the States were united and explore whether they are still united. As I mentioned, I really believe that things like huge stores and the homogenising influence of television and radio are reducing eccentricity to a mere trickle compared to what it was like a century ago. I look into the histories of those people who consciously decided to unite the different states. There is the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1804 to 1806, and I end with the people who built the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 60s. To give you one example from this great pantheon of once again rather “grotesque” people, I follow one remarkable geologist called Clarence King who did a survey of the west of America in the 1860s which took seven years. King did not like white women, even though he was white. He decided that he would if possible marry a black woman, but that was frowned upon in those days. So he created an alter ego for himself called James Todd, claiming to be a Pullman porter but with fairly pale skin. And ostensibly as a black man, he married a black woman in Baltimore. So he lived two lives. One Clarence King, geologist and ultimately director of the first US Geological Survey, and another James Todd, a black porter married to a woman from Baltimore. He didn’t let on to either of the other lives until a year before his death!"

"This is really the converse of most of the things I have been talking about here. Carrie is a very beautiful woman who came from Wisconsin. Some people thought this was a book about nuns, but it wasn’t. There is no nun-like behaviour in the book at all. Quite the reverse! Carrie goes to Chicago and falls in with a swell [a dandy]. He takes her on as his mistress, and her life is tremendously up and down. She has an affair with a man who is married, and is then taken to New York and lives in Lower Manhattan with a man who ultimately treats her badly. But she is determined to succeed, and makes it as a well-known starlet in up-market theatrical performances, while her lover declines to beggary. She ultimately leaves him and gives him $20, – the same sum, ironically, that she was given on her first date with the swell in Chicago. So this is an urban story which is gritty and shows real life. As a consequence of that it was frowned upon hugely at the time it was published, and as you mentioned it was heavily censored. But now it is regarded as a classic of early American modernist literature."

"Well, I think we all read that as children and I was most particularly excited by it a couple of years ago when I was in Western Iceland researching a big book on the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to climb up the side of Snaefellsnes and look into what was, of course, the entry point for Verne’s explorers in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. So I did and I looked in and felt duly stimulated. The book is a fantastic piece of science fiction – it’s basically about explorers who want to know what’s inside the earth and they go in via Snaefellsnes in Iceland and they find lakes and crystal caves and wonderful things and then, eventually, they are blown out back into Iceland by an enormous eruption. When it was written, in the mid-19th century, there was this debate between two groups of scientists arguing about the origins of the earth. The Neptunists believed that all rocks came about from the precipitation of sea water. The Plutonists believed that all rocks had been belched out from the middle of the earth. Jules Verne knew about this debate, of course, and rather sided with the Plutonists. So modern-day geologists can read it to see how fanciful and stupid people’s ideas about the earth were. Jules Verne got it completely wrong. It’s fun but foolish."

"This is an amazing book. It’s very Victorian and very pompous but absolutely accurate. It was written in 1835 and is a scrupulously well-researched piece of work about what it must have been like in Pompeii in the days leading up to the eruption. He builds brilliantly to the eruption of Vesuvius itself and describes the panic and how so many people died. Most of the people who were rescued were rescued by a blind woman called Nydia, because, of course, the blind can see when things go dark better than the sighted. When there are blackouts in New York you get the blind leading the way. No, that’s a fiction. It was a hugely popular book in the 19th century and perhaps it seems rather arch nowadays but it is very touching. It didn’t teach us much about the science of volcanoes but it taught us the aphorism that man lives on this planet subject to geological consent which can be withdrawn at any time. I think this book brought home to an English readership how capricious and powerful volcanoes are. He’d done a lot of research – there is good geology in it. He spoke to Charles Lyle, one of the founders of modern geology, and he told him all about what must have happened at Pompeii."

"This was also written in the mid-19th century and it’s an adventure story, a bit like Robinson Crusoe . A chap called Mark Woolston sails across the Pacific and is shipwrecked. He lands on an island surrounded by coral reefs and it turns out to be volcanic. He uses the volcano to store fresh water and provisions and then the volcano erupts, forms a new vulcan’s peak, and he survives the eruption and climbs to the top of the volcano from where he can see passing ships and he is saved. It’s a rollicking good adventure story but it also tells us something about the volcanic origins of coral atolls, something that Charles Darwin wrote about in the Voyage of the Beagle. It was written around the same time that Melville wrote Moby Dick and these books are all of a piece. Americans were writing about the natural world. I think so. I think that’s the reason we visit them so much as tourists. Earthquakes are altogether different because there’s not as much to see, but a volcanic eruption is like a gigantic waterfall or a huge storm and it’s very attractive, a visible manifestation of the power of the earth. In all three of these books the volcano is almost a living creature that we love and admire. When I was writing my book about Krakatoa I grew very fond of it. I mean, it exploded and had a baby."

"I think this may be my favourite book in the world. I was asked to write the preface for the Oxford University paperback edition. It’s about the eruption of Mt Pelée in 1902 on Martinique. It sent this thing, a glowing cloud, a nuée ardente, ash and lava and hot air rolling down the hillside. It completely devastated the town of St-Pierre and there was one survivor out of a population of 30,000. It was the worst volcanic disaster of the century, until the tsunami of 2005. Before that it was Krakatoa in 1883 when 40,000 people died, but most of those died from the tsunamis that followed the eruption. Tsunamis were detected all around the world after that eruption. Anyway, there was a ball being held in St-Pierre that night and, of course, everyone at the ball died, but the way it’s written is that he supposed all the guests survived and the party continued under the water. Fishermen say that a few miles out to sea when they are waiting for the fish they fancy they can hear music under the water. Louis-Auguste Cyparis. He was in prison and that’s what saved him, the only window was a narrow grating in the door. He was bad guy. A very violent man. I think he’d killed someone in a drunken fight. He went on to be a celebrity with Barnum and Bailey’s Circus. I love all Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books, but this is his sweetest."

"This is a children’s book and is fanciful nonsense but so charming. It’s about a balloonist who lands in the Pacific on Krakatoa, which is nonsense because Krakatoa is not in the Pacific. The island is all built of diamonds because there are diamonds in the volcano’s core, but, anyway, it erupts and they all have to escape. So the Professor, who was shipwrecked, makes 21 new balloons and they all fly away to safety. It’s a short, silly and utterly charming book which a generation of children, particularly American children, have enjoyed. Yes. It sounds a bit pompous but I’ve written probably the definitive book on Krakatoa and at the moment I’m ash man of the week. Actually the ash clouds of Krakatoa changed the colour of the sunsets for years afterwards and prompted a huge explosion of art. It’s funny really – this eruption in Iceland has prompted a huge explosion of travel chaos but after Krakatoa painters all over the world were inspired to pick up their brushes. Edvard Munch painted ‘The Scream’ ten years after he’d seen the skies over Oslo after the eruption in 1883 – those swirls of orange stayed with him. Everyone’s forgotten the eruption of Laki in Iceland in 1783 – it sent a gigantic cloud over Europe that killed cattle and scarred people’s skins. Oh yes. There is never any damage in Iceland. Laki stands no more than ten miles away from Eyjafjallajökull, which is erupting now, and there’s Hekla as well. If Iceland decides to misbehave itself… Well, I’m fascinated by this and the geological community is trying to prove the connections. For example, the Denali fault in Alaska shifts and every time it shifts the geysers in Yellowstone National Park erupt more rapidly for three or four days. These are geysers like Old Faithful which erupts with very precise periodicity, every 56 minutes. But when the fault shifts, suddenly the geysers four thousand miles away erupt more rapidly and then they calm down. The earth is like a great big brass bell and if you hit it hard it’ll vibrate for a long time and where there are cracks it will split. So, if you have an almighty earthquake, like the one in Haiti, it may well vibrate around the world. Have you heard of James Lovelock? The Gaia theory is that everything is connected and the earth is self-regulating. We all accept that the earth is heating up, so it opens the spigots a bit, lets out a lot of gas and cools itself down. In 1816 after Tambora erupted in what is now Indonesia, there was snow in Washington DC in July. It blanketed the earth with cloud and Byron was so miserable in Lake Geneva in the sheeting rain that he wrote the miserable poem ‘Darkness’ and then Mary Shelley went to visit him and was so depressed she wrote Frankenstein. So, you see, volcanoes can have lots of strange effects. Well, if the others go off and flood the world with a huge outpouring of basalt and it goes on for four years it could have significant cooling effects. Yes."