In December last year, The Conversation ran a two-part series in which they asked 20 experts about "the book that got them through their 20s".

Many of the books listed I'd not heard of, but it was interesting to consider at what point I'd read the ones I WAS familiar with, and how they impacted me, and what I would put forward as the book that got me through my 20s.

1.
Anita Brookner
Hotel du Lac
1984
Batting for this one is a professor of literature, who says: "I credit this novel for teaching me the aliveness of being unhoused, benumbed, and lonely. How to be a tortoise reader, not a hare, for 'hares have no time to read'."

I, too, came to Brookner in my 20s. My copy of Hotel du Lac, I note in the book memo I wrote when we started parting wholesale with books, was rather touchingly inscribed: "Merry Christmas, from all students of Level III, English for Overseas Students, 1984." I remember finding it impressive. But when I turned to Look At Me, I found I was going off Brookner. A little later still, in my early 30s, I listened to Providence, and my diary records: "I'm not sure about Brookner, with her clever, slightly wimpish heroines. The first one you read is enchanting; the second is enjoyable, but you're beginning to recognize a trend; and by the third, you're thinking, Wait a minute. These books are all the same."

But Kate Jones, whose book opinions I always take notice of, mentioned Hotel du Lac recently. She remembers "enjoying its gentle, satirical storyline" (and discusses the controversy that broke out when it won the Booker Price in 1984). So maybe a revisit is in order?

2.
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
1927
This was recommended by another literature teacher, who says: "It took a while for my inner ear to attune to the poetry of her rhythmical cadences; but once I learnt to attend to them properly, they utterly transformed my sense of what writing could be."

I read it in my 20s, and didn't really get it, as I noted here...



3.
Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
1925
Another of the experts cited this one, judging it "invaluable because it resists the binary of success and failure. Instead, it explores the richness of interiority, how past selves linger in present choices, and how the smallest gestures can shape a life. Woolf teaches us that meaning is stitched not in milestones but in moments, in glances, in a solitary walk to buy flowers."

Again, my first read, in my 20s, didn't do much for me. But I absolutely LOVED it when I read it -- all in a day -- with Henry Eliot's online group last year (in my 60s, for the record...)

I'm in the middle of a slow kind of project with Woolf and associates (Jacob's Room, The Hours, Heritage...). So this is a reminder to get on with that...

4.
Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
1997
"I was instantly hooked," says our expert.

Me too. I was in my 40s when I read this, and wrote a long panegyric in my diary:

"Truly one of the best books I have read for a long time. Beautifully told. Comical scenes, farce, and irony in the midst of tragedy of the worst sort -- the unnecessary sort. Evocative, child-like word-plays. Description of the freshest kind. Clever repetition. Clever creation of atmospheres. Everything hinted in the first chapter, and then the story slowly unfolds.

"How pitiful human beings are. How their disappointments sow bitterness. How their prejudices and self-centredness create unnecessary tragedy.

"How easy it is to wreck a childhood. How easy to twist souls into caricatures of themselves. How easy to stunt lives, create disaster.

"How important the juxtaposition of events is. If this hadn't happened, that wouldn't have happened. If that hadn't happened, this wouldn't have happened. Small things. The God of small things. Society, psychology, politics, religion -- these things we certainly can't control. But even when we stick to small things, we find we can't control them either. Too many inchoate drives, too much blindness, too much from-the-stomach hatred.

"Altogether excellent. A book that I think will live with me for a long time."

OK, so I must find some more Arundhati Roy as well.



5.
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
1899
The expert, a lecturer in African American literature, maintains: "[This book] is crucial reading in your 20s because it contains multiple opportunities for discovery, including self-discovery... To learn about colonial history is a vital education. Less obviously, it also exposes you to a narrative style which gets you questioning how a work of fiction can play with your confidence in truth."

I read it in 2013 (so not until my 50s...), and it was the first book I read on my newly acquired smart phone. My device back then was quite small, and the reader I started out with came with the bizarre frustration that the page-turn command didn't function consistently. Also, we were travelling, and I finished the book waiting for the train to KL after a stint in Perlis. So it probably wasn't an optimal reading experience. My diary noted: "Don't really know what to make of it. Is it a horrified and horrifying account of colonialism, or just more stereotyping of Africa and dehumanizing of Africans?"

Turns out I'm not the first to ask that question... Opinion is divided. Although, for example, Chinua Achebe, whose views can't be taken lightly, "was attracted to Conrad's book as a child, he excoriated it in the 1970s, and he continues to dismiss it today." Yet for Karin Hansson, "Heart of Darkness is universally considered the most powerful indictment of colonialism ever written..." And for Sophie Jane Williams: "The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is one of the most intriguing reads one can ever undertake... Every system, we are made to realize, is fraught with certain unanswered questions."

The Conrad I tackled in my 20s consisted of Under Western Eyes and Tales of Unrest (a compilation of five shorter pieces). I have little recollection of either. Then, having just reached my 50s, I read Lord Jim. I found it a harrowing story of a moral predicament, but slightly hard going. Not quite so hard going as Anita Loos's Lorelei found it (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)... She, you remember, commissions her maid to read it, and tell her the story...

But Lord Jim came before my Malaysia days, and certainly before my Sarawak days, and I didn't realize until later Conrad's connections with Borneo. Again, I feel a revisit would be in order.

Conrad has also been a bit of a project over recent years (partly because he's one of the most famous examples of Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own, but partly because of the Southeast Asia link). The Secret Agent was a good read, and The End of the Tether was gutting... And I was intrigued by Oliver Raw's article about Conrad and Ukraine.

Again, a project to be resumed.



6.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
1856
Our expert, a historian of memory, writes: "The novel reassured me that there was someone out there (albeit a fictional someone) making a bigger mess of life than me..."

I read this in my 20s, too: The Flaubert volumes I possessed (all in English at that stage: Madame Bovary, Three Tales, and A Sentimental Education) were dated 1979. I liked them all, Madame Bovary especially. (Having just crawled into my 30s, and by now able to read French fluently, I tackled Gustave et Pecuchet in its original version, but didn't enjoy it so much.)

***

Madame Bovary takes us closest to the literature I liked best in my 20s, I think.

There were two key threads: German Romanticism; and stories of marriage and families, particularly from the 19th century and early 20th century. I loved anything with a sniff of melancholy or nostalgia.

In no particular order, favourite authors from my 20s included Tolstoy, Hardy, Galsworthy, Turgenev, Zola, Maugham, Waugh, Mitford, Trollope, Stifter, Schnitzler, Fontane, Zuckmayer, Zweig, Storm, and Fallada...

As to naming one book, I just don't think I could...

Interesting exercise.