Taste, when it’s honest, is a confession. The books I keep returning to aren’t just favourites—they’re fingerprints, blueprints, psychic scars. They track the obsessions I can’t shake: masculinity, class, desire, memory, ruin.
These twenty aren’t unified by genre or style, but by their refusal to flatter the reader. They demand confrontation. They pick at the seams of identity—masculine, working-class, queer, adolescent—and examine what breaks and what bleeds when those seams split.
High Fidelity isn’t just about music lists and ex-girlfriends—it’s about the collapse of male self-definition in 1990s Britain. Rob is a man infantilised by nostalgia, paralysed by self-awareness. He knows he’s emotionally underdeveloped but can’t—or won’t—change. That’s Hornby’s genius: exposing a character who recognises his own dysfunction and chooses stasis anyway.
Compare that to Fight Club, which is still misread as a celebration of masculinity rather than its autopsy. The narrator conjures Tyler Durden as a toxic resurrection of a male ideal—ruthless, fearless, unbreakable—but the fantasy implodes. It’s not liberation. It’s self-destruction dressed up as empowerment. Where Rob internalises his failures, Tyler externalises them—with fists, chaos, and fascist charisma.
‘I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it “Entourage.”
This is how bad your life can get.’
In American Psycho, masculinity has no soul left to save. Patrick Bateman performs manhood as empty ritual: style, status, violence. He’s not a man—he’s an echo. All surface, no centre. What remains is a haunting portrait of what happens when a culture teaches men that performance is identity.
Not all these men are monsters, though. In Red Dragon, Will Graham is the exception—a man whose empathy makes him brilliant but also breaks him. His sensitivity isn’t a weakness; it’s a wound. And in Harris’s world, wounds don’t heal. They fester.
Running alongside the damaged men of these novels is another thread: queer desire. But not in its polished, performative form. These are stories of longing, repression, and the cost of love in the margins.
In Swimming in the Dark, Ludwik’s relationship with Janusz is both tender and doomed—framed by the political tension of 1980s Poland, defined by secrecy and stolen time. It’s less a love story, more a quiet rebellion.
Another Country walks this same tightrope, but with Baldwin’s fire. Queerness here isn’t just about sexuality—it’s an emotional, spiritual, and racial state of otherness. Love is offered, withheld, feared, weaponised. And it never comes without cost.
Then there’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, often misread as sentimental teen fiction. But beneath the mixtapes and awkward parties is a boy struggling with a trauma he can’t name and a queerness he can’t express. It’s not just coming-of-age—it’s surviving adolescence with your sensitivity intact.
‘It’s strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.’
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior offers no such comfort. Her stories are brutal, ambiguous, and emotionally dangerous. In Secretary, submission becomes a kind of liberation—or maybe another prison. Gaitskill never clarifies, and that’s the point. She doesn’t write redemption arcs. She writes consequences.
Place matters in these books—not as backdrop, but as pressure. Streets, estates, institutions—they grind down character like trauma does: invisibly, constantly.
In A Kestrel for a Knave, Billy Casper finds fleeting freedom in training a bird, but it’s not a redemption story. The town crushes hope as efficiently as it crushes futures. Billy doesn’t fall. He was never given anything to stand on.
Trainspotting takes that same despair and screams it. Welsh’s characters aren’t just addicts—they’re casualties of Thatcherism, grief, and cultural dislocation. The dialect, the swearing, the fractured form—it’s all resistance. Literature as middle finger.
A Kind of Loving takes a quieter route. Vic Brown marries for duty, not love, and resents it almost instantly. It’s not just about emotional repression—it’s about being boxed in by class and expectation. The tragedy is in the inevitability.
In Last Exit to Brooklyn, class and violence are the same beast. Selby’s characters survive through brutality or not at all. The language is jagged, almost unreadable in places—but that’s the point. It’s not meant to be smooth. It’s meant to hurt.
Ten Storey Love Song throws form out the window—a single, breathless paragraph following a tower block of lives moving too fast to be processed. It’s chaotic, vibrant, doomed. A rave novel, sure—but also a scream from a generation numbed by reality.
Some of these books wrestle with the past—not to romanticise it, but to show how memory distorts, erases, haunts.
The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a collective male voice obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, not for who they were but for what they represent. It’s a study in projection, in how men mythologise women into symbols they can’t understand.
In In a Lonely Place, post-war masculinity curdles into psychosis. Dix Steele’s inner monologue is chilling not for its rage, but for its banality. Evil doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it rationalises.
Even And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks—a flawed, uneven book—captures something essential about youth, myth, and violence. Its value lies not in the prose, but in the way it exposes how writers mythologise even the ugliest parts of their lives.
‘But you’re an artist. You don’t believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.’
William S. Burroughs & Jack Kerouac, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
And then there’s Dubliners, especially The Dead. The story ends not with drama, but with snow. Memory isn’t catharsis. It’s paralysis. Joyce doesn’t just mourn lost time—he shows how it keeps living inside us, dragging us backwards.
These books don’t offer easy resolutions. They don’t seek consensus. They’re emotionally complex, structurally daring, and unafraid of discomfort.
They taught me to trust voice. To embrace contradiction. To write characters who feel things they can’t articulate. To believe that the local—the estate, the shame, the silence—can be universal if you write it honestly.
They’ve shown me that the best writing doesn’t soothe.
It scars.
#IndieLitMagGala 2025 Spotlight: Spark to Flame Some journals are built to publish poems. Others are built to make connection happen.Spark to Flame
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
Founded in 2015 and still standing strong a decade later, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine isn’t trying to be edgy, obscure,
The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
