THE MAN’S READING LIST

There are books you read because you ought to, books you display because you'd like people to think you have, and books that mysteriously disappear from your bedside table at two in the morning because you've just decided on one more chapter. The best libraries contain all three. This isn't a list of books designed to make you richer, more productive or capable of waking at 4.45am for an ice bath. There will be no instructions for becoming an alpha male. It is simply ten books we think a man ought to encounter at some point: books about courage, obsession, faith, failure, love, horses, hell and the occasional catastrophic decision.

1. INFERNO

Dante Alighieri

If you're going to read about people behaving badly, you may as well start with the professionals. Dante's journey through Hell has everything: lust, greed, violence, treachery, corrupt politicians and the rather wonderful fact that Dante populated the place with several people he personally disliked.

Written more than 700 years ago, it remains strangely contemporary. Human beings, it turns out, haven't changed nearly as much as the trousers have.

2. EXODUS

Leon Uris

A great, sprawling historical novel set around the founding of Israel, Exodus moves between war, displacement, politics, survival and the creation of a new nation. It is unapologetically epic and deeply shaped by Uris's own perspective, which makes it a book to read alongside history rather than instead of it.

But as a piece of storytelling, it moves. This is the sort of enormous novel you begin slightly dutifully and then find yourself carrying around the house.

3. THE FIXER

Bernard Malamud

Yakov Bok is a Jewish handyman living in Tsarist Russia who is falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy. What follows is imprisonment, humiliation, bureaucracy and the slow testing of what remains of a person when nearly everything else has been removed.

It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but don't let that make it sound like homework. It is furious, uncomfortable and deeply concerned with one of literature's oldest questions: what does a man owe himself when the world has decided he is guilty?

4. MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Frank O'Hara

The title makes it sound as though Frank O'Hara might be about to tell you how to remain calm during a military coup. He isn't.

Instead there is New York, lunch, cigarettes, paintings, friends, sex, heartbreak and all the ridiculous thoughts that occupy the human mind while supposedly important things are happening elsewhere. O'Hara wrote poetry that feels wonderfully unbuttoned. If you've always maintained that you don't like poetry, this is a very good place to have that theory challenged.

5. ODDS AGAINST

Dick Francis

At some point a reading list should stop improving your soul and give you a bloody good story.

Odds Against introduces Sid Halley, a former champion jockey whose racing career has ended and whose new life as an investigator brings him rather closer to violence than he might have hoped. Francis knew racing intimately, having ridden professionally himself, and it shows. The horses aren't decoration. The entire grubby, glamorous world feels lived in.

Read one and you'll probably buy another six.

6. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Ernest Hemingway

Yes, Hemingway. Yes, the fish. We're putting it in anyway.

Santiago has gone 84 days without catching anything when he hooks an enormous marlin and finds himself in a battle that becomes considerably larger than fishing. Hemingway strips the story down until almost nothing remains except endurance, pride and the peculiar dignity of continuing when nobody is watching.

It is also short enough to finish before someone can accuse you of becoming a Hemingway man.

7. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

John le Carré

Forget exploding watches and Aston Martins. Alec Leamas is tired, compromised and operating in a world where nobody is entirely certain which side deserves to win.

Le Carré's Cold War is bureaucratic, damp and morally unpleasant. That's precisely why it is so compelling. Espionage here isn't glamorous. It is people manipulating other people while pretending there is some noble purpose behind it.

One of the great spy novels, largely because it has so little interest in behaving like one.

8. THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

Alexandre Dumas

Edmond Dantès is betrayed, imprisoned, escapes, becomes extraordinarily wealthy and dedicates an alarming amount of time and money to ruining everyone responsible.

There are shorter novels about revenge. There are probably healthier ones. None are quite this satisfying.

Dumas gives us adventure, treasure, disguises, aristocrats, poison, secret identities and elaborate plots within plots. At its centre, though, is a more interesting question: what happens when getting everything you wanted doesn't give you back what you lost?

9. THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens has spent his life being an excellent butler. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way he may have forgotten to have a life.

Ishiguro's novel is devastating precisely because almost nothing dramatic seems to happen. Stevens believes in professionalism, restraint and duty, qualities we normally admire. Gradually we realise what those virtues have cost him.

A useful book for anyone who has ever said, “I'll do that when work calms down.”

Work does not calm down.

10. THE RIGHT STUFF

Tom Wolfe

Before astronauts became schoolbook heroes, they were test pilots sitting on enormous quantities of fuel and behaving as though this were perfectly reasonable.

Tom Wolfe's account of America's early space programme is about bravery, competition, death, celebrity, marriage and the strange hierarchy among men whose profession involved regularly attempting not to explode.

It is also extremely funny.

Wolfe understood that courage is rarely as clean as we like to remember it. Ego, fear, vanity and genuine heroism can occupy the same man at exactly the same time. Which isn't a bad thought on which to close a reading list.

AND ONE MORE...

The Peregrine, J. A. Baker

Because every man should have at least one obsession that is of absolutely no practical use whatsoever.

Baker spent years watching peregrine falcons across the Essex countryside and produced one of the strangest and most beautiful pieces of nature writing in English. Eventually the distinction between observer and bird seems almost to dissolve.

No career advice. No seven-step system. No personal brand.

Just a man looking very, very carefully at something he loves.