Cool!

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Consistently cited as one of the most influential graphic novels ever written, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ ground-breaking story of an alternate USA in which it won the Vietnam war and welcomed (and later shunned) a generation of masked vigilantes resonates as much today as it did in 1986. As, indeed, does the recurring anti-Reaganist mantra ‘who watches the watchmen?’. Comic fan or not, everyone needs to own this. Burroughs didn’t so much disregard the literary rule book with Naked Lunch - he tore it to shreds and reassembled it as he saw fit, making his book one of the first examples of postmodern literature. Soaked in drug use, junkie William Lee (an alter ego for Burroughs himself) chases his next fix, warping from reality on the road between the US and Mexico into the Interzone, a dreamlike place based on Tangiers. Insanity in print. Another Michael Morpurgo book that will affect the average reader emotionally. It might be aimed at the 8-12 year old audience but it would take someone with a heart of stone not to feel something reading this.

When Movern Callar wakes up to find her boyfriend dead in the kitchen, having taken his own life, she decides to steal and sell his unpublished novel, passing it off as her own work. Warner won the prestigious Somerset Maugham prize for his debut novel, and it was also made into a film by Lynne Ramsay. I sleep a lot, almost all the time now. I want to stay awake in my head. I know I must, or else I'll die. Got to keep my mind awake. Got to keep living. But the trouble is that sleep is warm and gentle and inviting, and when it takes me by the hand I just want to go…." This story touches on a number of issues such as grief, separation and blame. It is a very gripping story which encourages the reader to read on. I found that this story was particularly unique because of the issues covered and the title 'cool', usually books with themes of grief for children, in my experience tend to have a title which gives the reader a clue about the tale. This is another one of Morpurgo's books which teaches the lesson; do not judge a book by its cover. Few writers manage to say so much about what appears to be so little as acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood might be his best known work, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is arguably his best. A typically mesmeric story, it focusses on the supposedly ordinary life of Toru Okada. In expertly drawing Okada in a bewildering variety of colours, Murakami succeeds in saying much about the confusion of late 20th century life. It was Amis’s experiences working on the screenplay for derided (and largely unwatched) sci-fi film Saturn 3 which lead him to write Money. As such, this is a scathing takedown of celebrity culture, his protagonist a deeply sleazy, hard-drinking ad director who heads to New York to make his first film, the first step on a path to his destruction.

A young American Jew travels to the Ukraine to try and find the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Nazi occupation. Bizarre, funny and touching, it marked its author Jonathan Safran Foer out as a smouldering talent.

With A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers scored himself a place as a finalist for a Pulitzer, as well as topping many a ‘book of the year’ list. A fictionalised memoir about having to raise his eight-year-old brother as a 20-year-old following the deaths of both their parents, it was much as its title suggested. Controversy and cool fit each other like hand and glove. The greater the controversy, the greater the cool. So it goes without saying that Hubert Selby Jr’s notorious debut novel has acquired something of a hip rep. Depicting a rundown area of New York in the 1950s, Last Exit to Brooklyn features drug addicts, wanton violence, rape, crime and any other deviancy you care to mention. Penned in everyman, spontaneous prose, it’s the book most aspiring writers hope to emulate.

Cool is a beautiful, moving and powerful story. It is also educational for children. I love the way that Robbie describes a coma. "Coma - funny word, that. Looks a bit like comma. Sounds like it too. Hope my coma is a comma, and not a full stop. I'm not exactly frightened of the "full stop". But I would miss everyone, everyone at home, at school….."The experience of being in a coma differs from person to person, and also depends on how deep the coma is. Some people remember events that happened around them while they were in a coma, while others don't. Some people have reported feeling enormous reassurance from the presence of a loved one / friend. Morpurgo is able to touch on issues such as separated parents, blame and grief in a very delicate way. This book is similar to David Almond's book 'Skellig' in the fact that it is hard to put down! This book is about a boy called Robbie who was chasing his dog aross the road because a car was coming and his dog was running after a cat.He ran out into the road and a car hit him.He was raced to hospital and thats all he could remember.

The ‘laureate of American lowlife’, in Factotum Bukowski presented his alter-ego Henry Chinaksi, a shambling booze-hound meandering from one disastrous menial job to the next with an increasing level of disdain as he struggles to get himself published as a writer. Set in the seamy world of the 40s LA barfly, this is a grubby classic.The awards that Franzen’s third novel The Corrections didn’t win, weren’t really worth winning. Even some of the ones it did win weren’t worth winning, an endorsement from the Oprah Winfrey book club, for example, which he dissed and resulted in a petulant shunning of him by the media mogul. Whatever, this story of family dysfunction is a modern masterpiece. Films you can quote for cheap giggles down the pub; records (vinyl, natch) earn you kudos among a select coterie of like-minded obsessives; but nothing – absolutely nothing – says understated cool (always the coolest cool) like a well-thumbed copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. What is a Narrative Arc? Learn the intricacies of building a narrative arc, and how to attain a good beginning, middle, and end to your story in this blog post.