Art: The New Model Army Book and Text Selection

The Reading List

Intro. 1 - the Plain English Version:

Welcome to the New Model Army book and text selection, a guide to the band's favorite books. NMA, like many people, enjoy reading - especially during the many miles they travel while on tour, and the long hours spent in hotel rooms before and after performances - with a book, you can be 'at home' anywhere. This list will be updated at intervals to incorporate the band's current favorites. If you have a particular favourite book, please write a short review or description of it an send it to us here, and we'll create a fan's Book List to add to this section - we look forward to receiving your thoughts on this matter. RDB.

Intro 2 - the Creative English version:

The Reading List - an ongoing list set to continue for all eternity and beyond, compiled, collected and catorgorised by the beautiful, charming, intelligent, witty, and thoroughly underrated Raven DB (well, come on, if I don't say it, who will?).

Now, follow me, shipmates, into the stygian gloom of the ancestral New Model Army Library, located somewhere in the far flung reaches of an uncertain galaxy, on a tiny, aged planetoid a bit to the left of Sirius Minor. Outside, a solar windstorm is ravaging the eroded planet surface, the eerie howl of the cosmic blast just audible through the massive simstone walls of the decayed manse. We are in the season known as Sttrigiarr - or, Eternal Night, where the only light comes from the gibbous gleam of the Three Moons Of Langguu - sensible life-forms stay in their dwellings at this time, for who knows what degenerate, monstrous creatures roam the land in this dreadful, bosky gloom?

Well, probably only the Postie-life-form, on it's creaky old helibike, delivering yet more volumes from Old Earth that I, the Librarian, have to list and catalogue for my absent masters, while they hurtle from planet to planet, space-station to space-station plying their traditional minstrel-craft and having a right knees-up. Who knows when their personal space limo, the GS "Chiarivari Charabanc", will dock once more at this, their family home? When will the dusty ( you can't get the staff, these days) banqueting hall and subterranean recording studio ring to the crazed, ethereal plain-chants that have made them the Intergalactic Supernovas they are today? When will the galactobohemian, cryogenetically preserved, compusurgically enhanced and modified Lords Of Chaos set the Old Place topsy-turvey with their strange luggage and curious food? Who knows? And indeed, who cares when you've got to unpack huge boxes of obscure or weird books and ancient texts from every mail-order bookshop on Old Earth and bloody well sort them out with no help from the only other staff member here, the Aged Retainer and General Dogsbody, Ned ("call me Ishmael") Ludd. And he's about as much use as a chocolate teapot, believe me. Oh, a Librarian's lot is not a happy one, happy one. Still, it's better than the Rigel 3 Panreligous Home for Troubled Female Entities, which is where I was before this job popped up. Like, you can have too much Born Again For The Third Time Panreligous fervour, you know, and all that howling, shrieking and bodmodding in honour of the Great I-Am, the Hidden Godhead, The Deity That Might Exist Or Then Again Might Not, gives me a bleedin' migraine. Better the books, I say, at least it's cosy in here with the pseudologs burning merrily in the massive plastone fireplace, the holocats stretched out in front of the blaze, twitching in their holosleep and chasing holomice in their electronic dreams. Yeah, and when the triple-thick, wine-red, floor-to-ceiling, Authentic Simulated Venusian Velvet drapes are closed against the terrible darkness and the excoriating typhoon outside, the virtual candles are flickering in their sconces, and NMA's 2,001th album is playing quietly on the castlewide metasystem, well, space cadets, it's downright homey, don't you think?

Now, you lot just settle down - plonk yourselves anywhere, there's plenty of room, and while Ned brews up a nice cuppa and toasts a few of Ma Goatspittle's Famous Genuine Blackhole Crumpets, ("My, they're Singular, Folks!") I'll get on with the unpacking and we'll see what we will see, eh?

Fiction:

Hermann Melville - "Moby Dick"

Mary Renault - "The Alexander Trilogy"

Emily Bronte - "Wuthering Heights"

James Joyce - "Dubliners"

Mary Shelley - "Frankenstein"

Albert Camus - "The Plague"

Rudyard Kipling - "Collected Short Stories" & "Kim"

W. Somerset Maugham - "Collected Short Stories"

James Lee Burke - "In The Electric Mist With The Confederate Dead"

John Steinbeck - "The Grapes Of Wrath"

Truman Capote - "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

F. Scott Fitzgerald - "The Great Gatsby"

Dorothy Parker - " Collected Dorothy Parker"

Edith Wharton - all novels

Arnold Bennett - "The Old Wives' Tale"

Stella Gibbons - "Cold Comfort Farm"

J.B Priestley - "English Journey" & "The Good Companions"

Saki - "The Complete Saki"

Colette - all writings

Simone de Beauvoir - "The Second Sex"

Thomas Harris - "The Silence Of The Lambs" & "Red Dragon"

Carl Hiaasen - "Native Tongue"

Rafael Yglesias - "Fearless"

Jonathan Raban (editor) - "The Oxford Book Of The Sea"

Sebastian Faulkes - "Birdsong"

Non-Fiction:

Michel Foucault - "Madness & Civillisation" (English version - Routledge Press)

Marcus Aurelius - "Meditations" (Everyman's Library)

Simon During (Editor) - "The Cultural Studies Reader" (Routledge Press)

Clive Ponting - "A Green History Of The World" ( Penguin Books)

John Brewer - "The Pleasures of the Imagination, English Culture in the Eighteenth Century" ( Fontana Press)

James Frazer - "The Golden Bough" - the single volume abridgement - (Penguin Books)

Roland Barthes - "Mythologies"

Tsun-Tsu - "The Art of War"

Isabel Fonseca - "Bury Me Standing" (Vintage Books)

Martin Dillon - "Stone Cold" (Arrow Books)

Bill Bryson - "Mother Tongue" (Avon Books)

Ian Gentles - "The New Model Army" (Blackwell Books

Christopher Hill - "The World Turned Upside Down" (Peregrine Books)

Thomas Paine - "The Age Of Reason" (Citadel Books)

James Lovelock - "The Ages of Gaia" (Oxford Books)

Brian Keenan - "An Evil Cradling" (Vintage)

Keath Fraser (editor) "Worst Journeys -The Picador Book of Travel" (Picador)

Eric Newby - "Round Ireland in Low Gear" (Picador)

Redmond Hanlon - " Into the Heart of Borneo" (Penguin)

Dervla Murphy - "Full Tilt" (Arrow Books)

Poetry:

The collected works of Dylan Thomas

The war poetry of Wilfred Owen

The war poetry of Seigfried Sassoon

The collected works of W.B Yeats

The collected works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Joolz - "The Pride of Lions" (Bloodaxe Books)

"The Rattle Bag" - edited by Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes

The collected works of Robert Frost

The collected works of Gerard Manley Hopkins

"20th Century Russian Poetry" - edited by A.C Todd & M.Hayward (Fourth Estate Books)

The collected works of Edwin Muir

The collected works of William Blake

Thom Gunn - "The Man With Night Sweats" (Faber & Faber)

Matthew Barry Sullivan - "The Axeman Cometh, Oh Ja La La" 9 Anthony Taylor Books ISBN 090772809X)

So, there we have it, shipmates, not the complete list , no - but, in truth, how can it be? For as R. Barthes said, reading is the most intimate act a human (or other lifeform, naturally) can do; it's just you and the naked text, alone, even in the midst of the cacophanous, odourous bustle of the Leuckmontrian Medina at full Marsrise; hey, not even microdoses of Dr. G'naar'botz' Famous Spaakaadoo Ampoules at minute intervals can distract you from that passionate intercourse with the printed (or embroidered) page, and boy, oh boy, here at the NMA Library we are nothing if not promiscuous. So as Time wends it's glutinous way round the elleptical Universe, just keep checking for additions to this List. And as the seasons change from the Eternal Darkness of Sttrigiar to the delightful Cherroid Blossom Season of Makkguine'a (when we here at Chateau Jamracket can venture outside into the opalescent sunlight for a Spell) so I will update the tomes and volumes that have taken the fancies of our Chaotik Lords - the better to stimulate your fatigued cortexes and delight your weary spirits as you hotdog through Life.

Yours, (naturally),

RDB (Librarian of the Outer Dark and Temporary Mambo Goddess)