Since then I’ve continued on my magpie way, and in the last 10 years have found that I read more and more, in particular the 19th- and 20th-century classics that I speed-read in my teens. Most of them are totally different from the books I remember. I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination. I never read my own fiction.
In compiling my list of 10 favorite books I have selected not those that I think are literature’s masterpieces, but simply those that I have read most frequently in the past five years. I strongly recommend Patrick Trevor-Roper’s “The World through Blunted Sight” to anyone interested in the influence of the eye’s physiology on the work of poets and painters. “The Black Box” consists of cockpit voice-recorder transcripts (not all involving fatal crashes), and is a remarkable tribute to the courage and stoicism of professional flight crews. My copy of the Los Angeles “Yellow Pages” I stole from the Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; it has been a fund of extraordinary material, as surrealist in its way as Dalí’s autobiography.
“The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West
“Collected Short Stories,” Ernest Hemingway
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Annotated Alice,” ed. Martin Gardner
“The World through Blunted Sight,” Patrick Trevor-Roper
“The Naked Lunch,” William Burroughs
“The Black Box,” ed. Malcolm MacPherson
“Los Angeles Yellow Pages”
“America,” Jean Baudrillard
“The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,” by Dalí
J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books
The renowned English writer reflects on the literature that shaped his imagination.
The MIT Press Reader
Excerpted from: Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007