Mike Figgis: My six best books
BRITISH director Mike Figgis, who is also a composer, writer and producer, is famous for films including Leaving Las Vegas and The Browning Affair. He will host Sky Arts Cinema With Mike Figgis on Sunday nights from April 11 on Sky Arts 2/HD.
Something Happened
by Joseph Heller
Vintage, £8.99
I even prefer this 1974 classic to Catch 22. It deals with family and memory and the agony of raising a child or two. Some of the images in it really will stay with me for ever.
A Fan’s Notes
by Fred Exley
Out of print
Exley is for me one of the greatest of 20th century American writers. He writes about himself, of being a writer and other writers. At the same time he describes his own descent into alcoholism and time spent in mental hospitals. My favourite sequence deals with the filthy corruption of a soap opera from Exley’s couch-potato viewpoint.
A Dance to the Music of Time
by Anthony Powell
Arrow, £15.99 per volume
This is a great cathedral of a novel and I don’t think any other writer has come anywhere close to Powell’s 12-part journey from childhood to old age. It’s like the Forth Bridge of English literature. You finish it and then you just start all over again.
Nine Stories
by JD Salinger
Atlantic Books, £6.99
I’m a big short story fan and JD Salinger, like F Scott Fitzgerald, is, I think, completely at home in the genre. Each of these stories is an absolute gem but add them together and the total is a novel.
Straight Life
by Art Pepper
Out of print
Art Pepper was a white jazz musician from LA addicted to heroin. This is brutally honest, describing his time in prison and his fascination with women. There’s very little about jazz but it’s a great portrait of the time. I was briefly involved in plans to film this story but his widow and I did not see eye to eye.
In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
Out of print
Hemingway moved American writing along in significant ways. These stories combine fiction and journalistic accounts of war. To me the writing still seems fresh and young. It’s also early Hemingway before he became the big man of American fiction, so there is still a tenderness and humility in these stories.
