MY SIX BEST BOOKS
MILTON JONES, 53, is the comedian who appears regularly on Mock The Week and presents BBC radio shows such as Thanks A Lot, Milton Jones! He is touring in his show Milton Jones Is Out There. miltonjones.com THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber, £8.99 An exquisite tale of regret from the upstairs-downstairs world of a country house in the 1930s. The head butler is unable to admit his love for the housekeeper, then his Lordship turns out to be a Nazi sympathiser. Repressed feelings spurt out sideways like Play-Doh through a sieve. So British, so sad. THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
by Arundhati Roy
Harper, £10.99 I put a lot of care into writing daft lines. This debut novel is bulging with sentences that are plain beautiful, jewels of language that paint an intoxicating picture of India and family relationships. FEVER PITCH
by Nick Hornby
Penguin, £8.99 This book intelligently describes how the life of a football fan is bound to the highs and lows of their club, which in many ways is illogical and embarrassingly tribal. It’s about Arsenal, my team, so I identify with the joy and frustration of being irrationally attached to a bunch of millionaires I’ve never met. COLLECTED POEMS
by Dylan Thomas
W&N, £9.99 My father was from Swansea (that “lovely ugly town”), not far from where Thomas lived. The language of these poems conveys both the beauty and the melancholic rhythm of the area. The epic and the trivial, the ethereal and the blunt are side by side. TINTIN: Explorers On The Moon
by Hergé
Egmont, £10.99 A friend gave me this for my sixth birthday around the same time as the Apollo missions, except the real astronauts didn’t have their hair growing in multiple colours as a result of the Formula 14 in the book. It was not my last Tintin book. THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
by CS Lewis
Collins, £8.99 A short satirical book about the nature of evil. It takes the form of one experienced devil trying to teach a novice how to bring down “the Patient” and keep him away from “the Enemy” (God).