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Desert Island Books

Colin Coulter

Colin is an Anaesthetic Registrar.  "Before medicine, I studied English Literature at University which was a continuation of a life-long love of literature. Reading is one my greatest pleasures in life, you get to sit down one-to-one with the greatest minds that have ever put pen to paper and spend as long as you want walking around their world and listening to them! Deciding on 5 books was hard enough but here goes…".
 

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky's great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be beyond conventional moral laws. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck.

Colin says: "Dostoevsky’s masterpiece (one of them!). Simply put, a man who murders and then tries to understand why he did it. It is one of the greatest works of literature I have ever read by a writer who has inspired most of the greatest novelists and thinkers since from Nietzsche to Freud. It is a masterclass in human psychology. Crime and Punishment was/is prophetic; it diagnosed a problem that threatened 19th century Russia and beyond. Dostoevsky created a portrait of a truly terrifying man whose shadow we can still see today. The perilous effects of dogmatic ideology, the disintegration of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov will keep you hooked, terrified and exhilarated until the very last page (of a big book)! Also, one of the characters was an inspiration for Columbo!"

Paradise Lost – John Milton

In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men', or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.

Colin says: "John Milton’s poetic masterpiece. Milton, writing before the invention of the Guttenberg Press, is thought to have read all of the major works of literature that had ever been written and spoke well over ten languages! Paradise Lost is the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden set over 12 parts with some of the most majestic English prose you can read. It’s a poem I return to again and again throughout my whole life. The closing lines are some of the most moving you will ever read. And it was mainly written by recitation to his wife and daughters who were his scribes because Milton was blind by this point!"

 

The Stranger  – Albert Camus

The classic literary masterpiece, The Stranger, is a story about Meursault, the titular character who commits a murder after attending his mother’s funeral. His understanding of the world, his emotional spectrum, and the general absurdities of the time all combine to form a compelling read. The story is aptly divided into two riveting sections, both told from the perspective of Meursault, who gives us his views before the murder in the first section and later walks us through his state of mind after the murder in the second section. The two parts in this thrilling novel encompass the protagonist’s mindset through the ordeal of grieving for his mother’s death while also coming face to face with his own moral compass for committing a murder.

Colin says: "L’étranger by Albert Camus is the great work of literature depicting the central crisis of existentialism. Told in the first person, the Stranger is hyper-stylised as you are drawn into the peculiar perspective of Mersault, a man who seems completely detached from everyone around him. For anyone interested in existentialism, this book is a wonderful provocative glimpse into some of its central questions and will leave you as stunned and perplexed as all the charcters who encounter Mersault. It has one of the best openings of any book I’ve read and sets the pace and tone for the whole novel – “Mother died today, or was it yesterday?”"

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Charles Marlow, at the behest of his employer, an ivory trading company, travels to the heart of Africa with a simple order: seek out an important trading post headed by a man named Kurtz. On his steamboat down the Congo River, Marlow begins to discover a developing lore surrounding Kurtz, who has reached a near mystical and divine status, yet feared and intimidating all the same.

A seminal novel that had a wide range of influence in the century to follow, Heart of Darkness explores the disturbing idea that the sanity residing in the human psyche is frightfully close to the edge of madness.

Colin says: "Joseph Conrad never expected this book to get the attention it now has. A novella, less than 150 pages long. Heart of Darkness raises more questions than it answers. A pertinent book to read these days as people are more engaged with questions about empire and race. Writing in his third (!) language, the book is extraordinary in its use of English and very obscure narrative style. This book simply has everything, a fascinating story and beautiful lyrical passages that are often describing harrowing scenes."

 

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa 

 

In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.

Colin says: "My wife is Italian and this was the first Italian book she recommended to me. It is a text every Italian will read (after the Divine Comedy!) and helps you understand the wonderful but complicated history of Italy. Set in Sicily at the time of the risorgimento, the event that ended in the unification of Italy. It is the story of a family, at a time of immense change. The novel casts its gaze along the long history of my favourite country whilst at the same time telling a deeply personal story of a noble family whose dynasty is coming to an end. The closing lines are beautiful. Il Gattopardo always reminds me of my wonderful wife. As doctors, we sadly witness deaths more than most people; Il Gattopardo has the most moving death scene I have ever read and when my time comes, I hope it’s as beautiful as this one."

Still to read...

Ulysses – James Joyce

Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'.

Colin says: "The definitive work of post-modernism. My father is Irish which is another reason I should read Joyce’s greatest work. Maybe alongside Finnegan Wake (also by Joyce) it must be one of the hardest novels to read. Over 900 pages of post-modernist madness set entirely over one day in Dublin, I have started Ulysses a few times but never get past the first hundred pages. I will read it one day!"

 

Luxury Item

"A wine cooler full of Brunello di Montalcino wine."

Record

"Vissi D’Arte by Maria Callas!"