Featured here not because I have anything new or interesting to say about it, but simply because any reading list in my life would be incomplete without it. Tolkien can transport anyone to the mythic realm at the drop of an elf’s hat, and send me just with his instinct for names.
 
Tolkien was a brummie, bless ’is heart. My auntie and gran lived in Moseley, walking distance from the Dell and Sarehole Mill, inspirational settings for the Shire in Lords of the Rings, which let’s face it, is a bit of alroyt.

The charm of the concept is that it is entirely credible that a hidden London might physically exist beneath street level.

Door is its rabbit hole to this Wonderland, its wardrobe to Narnia, although there the similarity ends, because London Below is no fantasy, but as factually real as the city we know, and exists in conjunction with it. Even though it is a place of magic, it is subject to limitations of its own and the primary challenge is that of survival when confronted with Underdwellers. The adventure is  fraught with danger and cruelty and full of novelty.
 
Gaiman lures us into suspending disbelief by lending significance and protagonism to everyday elements and people that we might overlook, such as homeless rough sleepers. It is a nice touch that these assume a greater role for once, also to make the Angel, Islington into a character, and for there to be a real Baron of Baron’s Court: it all delights the reader with beguiling imagination.
 
As soon as you have a hero going underground, an unconscious quest of some kind is going on. The treatment can be whatever you wish; I am partial to serious fun and Neverwhere is just that. This, to me, is what fantastical writing is all about: a believable story with elements of mythic adventure that takes us on an entertaining journey, giving us characters (Richard and Door) that we care and root for, all the while suggesting other dimensions to everyday reality that we are commonly blind to, or another way of living this one.
 
Playing the game of life on a different board, where the same values hold, but the struggles of body and soul have a heightened drama.

Some books are just Very Special. Le Guin conjures up a people, a land, an entire culture. Their tales, dances, poems, symbols, drawings, songs, customs, their maps and alphabet. An imaginary northern Californian utopia about people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.”
 
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality…” Ursula Le Guin (“Freedom”)

Yes, I like it so much I got three.
 
We’re back out on the highways of the USA looking for freedom and redemption.
 
Liking a variety of fiction is as natural as liking different kinds of people. One close to my heart is that subtly exciting world that’s as real as the street that you live on, the difference being that the magical can slip through the interstices and you might just meet a local god in the laundrette. In other words: a more interesting world and a consciousness enriched by archetypes from the equally real, yet hidden unconscious.
 
American Gods does this wonderfully well. Neil Gaiman, Shadow and Mr Wednesday take us on a joyride through the squalid landscapes of the American soul. A place where old gods can take a foothold and, yes: that means trouble. I was so taken with the possibilities that I gave Odin another outing in my John Eyre. Neil’s agent assured me that the Norse god was in the public domain and that it was just fine.
 
I really hoped to enjoy the TV adaptation of American Gods, but it was just trashy. Gaiman’s world is best left to come alive in each reader’s imagination.
 
I’m told that such fiction, which I took to myself in Hoodwink and John Eyre, has a sub-genre all to itself: “urban fantasy.” Well, why not? Way I see it, if you get the broad intent behind genres, it's simply a question of making them work for you.

Whenever I wanted a new Philip K. Dick title, I would typically get a cheap second-hand copy from the late, great Mike Don and his Dreamberry Wine listing, who would mail it on trust of receiving a cheque by return, for the price of the book plus the value of the stamps.
 
On this occasion, I happened upon one that I hadn’t read at a book stall at Wat Buddhapadipa, a full-blown Thai Buddhist temple in the leafy suburbia of Wimbledon, an incongruity that I am sure Dick (and Mike) would have admired.
 
And yet, on rereading it thirty years later, I find it’s just not very good. The plot’s uninspiring (although the prospect of Hermann Goering’s reappearance got my pulse racing for a while); the characters, such as the paranoid psychokinetic pianist, Kongrosion, are difficult to like, the disparate groups and players and ideas don’t hang together and the novel’s brought to a hurried, unsatisfying end.
 
But what can I say? It’s still Phil Dick. I enjoyed it well enough along with all the others way back when and it constitutes another brick in The Wonderful World That Dick Made. It features the adorable empathic papoola and the brilliant idea of adverts that torment and fight a way into your home where you have to splat them like the pests that they are.
 
I remember that after the meditation session at the Wat Buddhapadipa, everyone except me filed out to go and have tea and talk about it. I was left behind, unable to move my stiffly locked legs after sitting in lotus position. Eventually, I toppled myself onto one side to slowly, painfully extend my limbs and get to my feet. Then wandered home clutching my Dick.

There is a certain kind of writing that just gets me and when it’s wed to a lost, lonely American urban landscape, I feel a homesickness that as an Englishman I am at a loss to explain. Tim Powers writes a seductive magic-seeping-into-the-everyday vein that I find terrifically persuasive and personal.
 
His America is as real as it gets. The poverty and seediness are sticky, smellable and more believable than any shiny prosperity; there are diesel fumes and chain link fences, and beer cans leave marks on the floor. But we all see—or think that we see—strange things, right? Especially in disturbing or emotionally charged times. What if those strange things are real?
 
I sided with the bereaved Crane from the outset and couldn’t wait to see how he got on. When you’re down on your luck, superstition can seem to offer a last hope, but you don’t seriously expect it to describe power play in the real world: until it does. Stephen Crane is the unwilling knave, or one-eyed Jack, in games of chance that invite spirits of chaos to operate in the material world. More so, when the pack of cards is the Tarot.
 
I picked up Last Call, my first Tim Powers book, on travels through Guatemala and was immediately captivated by his style and by having found a contemporary writer who did what I was interested in myself: the emergence into our familiar world of a hidden dimension—and the serious fun you can have with that.
 
For me, the most interesting and refreshing factor in this kind of fiction, and its particular attractiveness, is that characters are motivated by something other than material gain or selfish desire. That’s a huge message. The main players are not presidents, tycoons, the rich and the beautiful, but poor, shabby individuals whose lives would otherwise be unredeemed by significance, and the most important vehicle on the road is just as likely to be a clapped-out old van as an expensive limo. It’s exactly the same world as the one we live in, only different—and much more.

Isn’t it heartening that we have such good living writers?
 
What I get out of reading contemporary generational books about middle-class America is, from a shifted angle, a view of my own English experience, and a reminder me of how the wider world has changed. From an uptight, rules-observing society to an uptight narcissistic individualism in which no individual feels complete. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.
 
Franzen’s skill in depicting the lives of family members from their varied points of view is there again in Freedom, also humorous, also sad and insightful. Of the two, I found The Corrections somehow fuller and more satisfying.

If you had as abysmal a history teacher as I did when I was a teenager, whose idea of teaching was to fill blackboard after blackboard with notes and tell us to copy and learn them, the study of the past became a big turn-off.

Enter Derek Jacobi, with John Hurt as the psychopathic Caligula, in the BBC’s adaptation of Graves’ books I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and Roman history suddenly came marvellously alive. It wasn’t about wars and politics, but a family—and the stammering Claudius who survives even his appalling grandmother, Livia, to become emperor.
 
It wasn’t until much later that I read the books and discovered just how superbly historical fiction could be written. What is it about antiquity that brings out the best in writers? Graves’ autobiography of Claudius is one of the most tremendous reads you will ever have.

At a moment when the demon of work had long kept me from adventuring myself, here I found fiction that took me on far-ranging travels: through different yet connected historical periods, political and economic intrigue, scientific advances, cryptology and multiple entertaining episodes that mixed invented characters with well-known figures and events, while conjuring up the living conditions of the century. I have a thing about Isaac Newton and alchemy (they played a significant role in my book “Hoodwink”) and they are here, too. I enjoyed the long, humorous digressions, liked the smart, sexy Eliza and also the notion of making Enoch Root apparently immortal and able to crop up in and link any of the story lines.
 
Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon before going on to devise and write Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World as the grandest of prequels. I prefer old-fashioned chronological order and I’m glad that saved Cryptonomicon until last, to let its more recent and modern-day narrative feed off all that had gone before.