Three shelves, one voice. Some books don’t just stay on the shelf; they stay in the bloodstream. They shape the way you hear language, the way you see people, the way you understand systems. These are the books that formed the internal landscape that keeps me writing.1
They are not favourites. They are foundations.
1. The Voice Shelf
This shelf is the voice layer — reflective, rhythmic, humane, slightly anarchic, slightly mystical, and occasionally absurd. These are the books that formed the adult cadence — the rhythm, the myth, the interiority, the rebellion, the absurdity.
James Joyce
Finnegans Wake — language as dream.
Ulysses — interiority and cadence.
I read Finnegans Wake in my final year at grammar school. It struck me because it is endless — the final chapter loops straight back into the first. You can read it forever, and never in the same way twice.
At nineteen I had glandular fever — the so‑called kissing disease; I remember who you are. I was ill for three weeks and used the time to read Ulysses.
Joyce taught me that language isn’t a tool; it’s an environment.
Herman Melville
Bartleby the Scrivener — refusal as philosophy.
I read Moby Dick as a youngster, but it never sparked. Years later a friend gave me Bartleby the Scrivener. I’ve read it more than once. I still don’t know why it makes such an impression — but it does.
Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — rebellion and humanity.
Sometimes a Great Notion — rivers, families, stubbornness.
The Demon Box — myth in fragments.
I believe I have consumed all of Kesey's output over the years. In Kesey, and in Hugh Romney, I’ve always recognised a kindred spirit — a sense of mischief wrapped around a sense of mercy.
Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — voice as weapon.
A book that doesn’t so much open as detonate. Seatbelts compulsory. My favourite line: “The people on the sidewalk looked dangerously frightened.” It’s the moment where reportage tilts into hallucination — and somehow becomes truer than the literal truth.
Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool‑Aid Acid Test — colour, movement, reinvention.
I had no alternative; I had to read this. Wolfe’s book sits exactly on the fault line between truth and fiction, where reportage becomes myth and myth becomes culture. It’s the moment the counterculture realises it is being watched — and performs anyway.
Douglas Adams
Everything he wrote — absurdity as clarity.
Adams was a goldmine of humour, but never just humour. His cheerfulness hid a precision engine: brilliant characters, outrageous invention, and a worldview that made nonsense feel like the only sane response. My favourite line: “My other car is also a Porsche.” A throwaway joke, delivered with such perfect deadpan that it becomes a philosophy of its own.
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus — lucidity without a verdict.
The Rebel — revolt that will not kill for an idea.
Sisyphus is how to stay. The Rebel is how not to become the thing you stayed to refuse.
Magnus Mills
All Quiet on the Orient Express — quiet, looping menace; ordinary labour turned mythic entrapment.
The Restraint of Beasts — deadpan humour, repetition, and the strange poetry of work.
I’ve read other books by Magnus Mills, but these two stay with me. He has a way of making the humdrum feel like a mask for the macabre — the everyday tightening, inch by inch, until you realise you’re trapped in a story that never raises its voice.
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot — the architecture of waiting; humour carved from emptiness.
Murphy — chaos, philosophy, and the strange machinery of the mind.
I’ll admit I find some of Beckett’s writing opaque. I’ve made peace with that — the opacity is my problem, not his. These remain my favourite play and my favourite novel. Beckett taught me that sometimes the honest response is simply to accept that there are things you do not know, and to keep reading anyway.
2. The Imagination Shelf
These are the childhood and adolescent adventure books — the ones that formed the early sense of story, danger, competence, and discovery. This shelf is the imagination layer — the pre-voice foundation, the soil from which everything else grew.
W.E. Johns
Biggles — competence, clarity, and the romance of aviation.
Berkeley Gray
The Lost World of Everest — hidden valleys, peril, and British daring.
US Imported Comics
DC, Marvel, Mad Magazine — a weekly Derbyshire market‑stall miracle.
Green Lantern — the oath learned by heart: “In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight…”
The Rover and The Wizard (DC Thomson)
Morgan the Mighty — strength, loyalty, and the clean moral lines of classic adventure.
Stan Stagg — grit, danger, and the stoic heroism of the weekly serial.
The Mudpluggers — earth, engines, and the joy of stubborn competence.
Michael Moorcock
Multiverses, eternal champions, and the mythic machinery of fantasy.
David Eddings
Quest‑structure, fellowship, and the comfort of well‑built worlds.
3. The Technical Shelf
This shelf is the technical layer the foundations of a career. These writers are not just teachers; they are guides on the road to clarity.
Michael A. Jackson
Principles of Program Design — clarity, structure, and the discipline of thinking before coding.
Problem Frames — Analysing and Structuring Software Development Problems.
Jackson was the first writer who made me realise that design is not decoration; it is logic made visible. His work taught me that a program is a story — and if the story is confused, the program will be too.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Structured Programming — precision, economy, and the refusal to tolerate muddled thought.
Dijkstra’s writing is famously uncompromising. He made me understand that elegance is not an aesthetic choice but a moral one: unnecessary complexity is a kind of dishonesty. He sharpened the way I think, not just the way I code.
It's rumoured that a student presented him with their finished program, he asked, "Would you step into a lift controlled by it?"
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
The Mythical Man‑Month — systems, teams, and the stubborn realities of building anything that matters.
Brooks taught me that software is never just software; it is people, communication, expectation, and time. His lessons are not about programming but about humanity under pressure — and they stay true no matter how the tools change.
If the only sentence he had ever written were, "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned to the task.", he would still be on my list.
Gause & Weinberg
Exploring Requirements — listening, questioning, and the art of discovering what someone actually needs.
This book taught me that most problems are not technical at all. They are misunderstandings. Requirements are stories told badly, and the job is to help people tell them better. It changed how I work and how I talk to people.
Notes from the shelves
The bookshelf isn’t chronological; it’s architectural.
There is a voice shelf — Joyce, Melville, Kesey, Thompson, Wolfe, Adams, Camus, Mills, Beckett.
There is an imagination shelf — Biggles, Everest, comics, boys’ papers, Moorcock, Eddings.
There is a technical shelf — Jackson, Dijkstra, Brooks, Weinberg, Gause.
Eventually I understood that the shelves weren’t a record of what I’d read, but a map of the person I was becoming. The books taught me that clarity is rarely kind; wonder is rarely safe. And the only honest way to move through the world — suspicious of its answers, grateful for its mysteries.