Culture Street

We are delighted that Jenny Ackland joins us today to share her five most influential books.

Jenny has worked in too many offices but only one themed restaurant; sold textbooks in a university bookshop; taught special education and English as a Foreign Language in Australia and overseas; and worked as a proofreader on magazines and freelance editor on technical publications. She's been blogging since 2005, and her short fiction has been listed in prestigious literary prizes and awards.

She has travelled widely, and has spent several years living in Turkey and Japan, but now lives in Melbourne with her husband and their three teenaged children. Her debut novel The Secret Son is about an Australian historian determined to find the truth, a stolen inheritance, a wishing tree, a long-lost grandmother, and an unlikely sweetheart. It is a novel about love, honour and belonging, and what it means to be a good person.

You can buy the book here.

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss

A mother bird lays an egg but prefers to holiday in Palm Beach than sit hatching. She enlists trusting elephant Horton to sit on her nest until she returns. ‘Soon,’ she promises. He does, through the months, through threats both climatic and human. An early lesson in ethics and backbone, this book introduced me to concepts that I remain staunch about today, and the idea that social justice and issues-based books can be the most compelling for me. Buy the book here.

The World According to Garp by John Irving

A capacious book, and difficult to render synoptically, Garp was the first novel I read which showed me how expansive contemporary realist fiction could be, while still utilising the comfortable conventions of 19th century storytelling. It’s dense with detail, marvellous characterisations, wonderful plotting, heartbreaking events and moments of hilarity. Irving (along with the works of early Peter Carey) showed me that a novelist can do whatever s/he desires. That s/he can launch a zeppelin, a humongous thing, fly it around a while and land it, safely in a field somewhere, the writer shaking out their hands, standing back and no doubt as delighted in the making as the reader in the reading. Buy the book here.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë’s only novel introduced me, at the somewhat naïve age of seventeen, to the idea that love could be something dark and clotted. For a young woman, it was the gothic elements and tortured existential connection that binds Cathy and Heathcliff, that captured my close scrutiny, but as an adult I came to appreciate the whole of the book, able to see how sophisticated and complex form of it, that it is infused with repetitive themes, names and story arcs, a beast of mirrors all facing each other, doomed to repeat in fiction as we repeat in life. It is a novel of huge influence; not so much for my writing style, but for the belief that regardless of a writer’s geography, gender or personal experience, raw imagination and originality are key. Buy the book here.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Read for the first time in my forties, Lolita stands unchallenged as the one work of fiction that most powerfully achieves an inverse correlation of content that unsettles with glorious and lush prose. It was deliberate on Nabokov’s part, as if to tell this story he had to have these beautiful sentences doing their intoxicating, numbing, distracting work alongside the mind-creeping truths of paedophilia that lie hidden in plain view nestled in the text. Puns, wortspiels, and acrostics – Nabokov’s playfulness was revelatory to me. Buy the book here.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Tartt’s muscular smart prose and driving storytelling is masterful. Beyond her snappy bob and men’s-cut suits, this book sits perfectly in the post-September 11 literary era, a sprawling Dickensian tour de force. It’s told retrospectively in first-person narration by Theo Drecker, who at thirteen lost his mother in a New York City terrorist attack. If I ever wondered whether story is important even in literary fiction, this book reinforced most vociferously: yes, it is. Buy the book here.