Best books… Reverend Richard Coles
Richard Coles, the vicar, Radio 4 presenter, and former pop star, picks six of his favourite books. He is talking about his new book, Bringing in the Sheaves, on 15 Nov at the Stratford Artshouse (www.stratlitfest.co.uk)
The Changeling
by Robin Jenkins, 1958 (Canongate £9.99). This novel is about a well-meaning teacher in Glasgow who intervenes in the life of a poor, tenement-raised kid – with unintended consequences. It should be much better known south of the border, or indeed wherever people read.
The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802
by James Woodforde, 1924 (Canterbury Press £25). Woodforde was an 18th century parson in Norfolk who kept a diary in which he tells, with unaffected appeal, the everyday story of his parish, from heartbreaking burials of infants, to his pigs getting drunk on home brew.
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh, 1934 (Penguin £9.99). Waugh’s greatest novel, a comedy of manners and the brutality which lies beneath, is set in the gilded circles of 1930s Mayfair and a dripping Victorian pile in the country, with an unlikely terminus in the South American jungle.
H is for Hawk
by Helen Macdonald, 2014 (Vintage £9.99). One of the best memoirs I’ve read in ages, an account of the writer’s fascination with falconry and her own all but untrainable goshawk, interwoven with the story of her beloved father’s death and how she began to live the changed life which followed.
The Russian Court at Sea
by Frances Welch, 2011 (Short Books £7.99). A vivid account of the end of the Romanov dynasty. Accompanying the Dowager Empress on board HMS Marlborough were a ragtag of family and followers. This exotic lot sailed from the Crimea to the Mediterranean and England following the Russian Revolution.
Selected Poems
by Don Paterson, 2012 (Faber £12.99). One of my favourite poets; Paterson writes about family life, and about peculiar lives in peculiar places, and about his native Scotland, with a voice that sounds simultaneously as artless as a pop song and as epic as Homer.