Eliot Lamb, the grad-school narrator of Ben Masters’ debut novel Noughties, reads constantly. Here, Ben Masters shares Eliot’s reading list.
Eliot’s own reading plays a key part in the novel, and I deliberately planted references to a range of coming-of-age novels and a couple of other books that offer either analogies or ironic commentaries to his own experiences.
They aren’t particularly surprising examples as they are meant to reflect what he has been reading at university, but they are still novels that I am very fond of myself.
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“Relationships end every day. People find each other, they lose each other. The levels of devastation may vary, but it’s a right of passage for all of us. This book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after,” says Charlie McDowell of his memoir Dear Girls Above Me.
“When my girlfriend abruptly ended our relationship over a casual lunch as carefree as she ordered her kale salad, I thought my life was over . . . . The girls above me were helping me more than anyone else I had in my life. Only they didn’t know it.”
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“The thing that particularly intrigued me about Eliot’s voice was its awkward relationship to his studies,” says Ben Masters of the narrator of Noughties.
He arrives at Oxford fairly rough around the edges and quickly finds that his head is being filled with a chaos of knowledge, mostly literary and philosophical, mostly perplexing, and he simply doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s where the voice comes from – a painful mixture of the colloquial and the literary.
I love my eBook reader. But I have to admit, sometimes I hate it a little too. I can take dozens of books on vacation (love), but I can’t read in the bathtub (hate).
The good thing is, there will always be physical books: keep-them-forever hardcovers, gorgeous trade paperbacks, chunky mass market paperbacks, leave-them-out-where-everyone-can-see-them coffee table books.
As conflicted as I am about my eBook reader, I will continue reading on it. Of course I will. And I will continue bringing books home from the book shop and lining my shelves.
Having my novel appear in the U.S. was a real thrill for someone brought up on U.S. television, music, and books.
Writing the novel was a quick but intense process. This seemed necessary – not only did the narrative demand a certain amount of speed and reckless energy, but I could also feel myself as a first-time writer outgrowing it and becoming distracted by other newly forming ideas.
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