The renowned English writer reflects on the literature that shaped his imagination.

J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books

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In this respect I differed completely from my children, who began to read (I suspect) only after they had left their universities. Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts than in reading “Pride and Prejudice” or “The Brothers Karamazov” — how naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, that radical reordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.

I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense of priorities was right — the heady, optimistic world of pop culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they had gained the maturity in their 20s and 30s to appreciate and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could have done at 16 or 17.

Books:

  • “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