Emily Perkins’ new novel The Forrests made a more noticeable impression on me than any new book I’ve read in 20 years; in fact, by the end of it I was buzzing as though I’d taken a drug. I had to go back over the last 30 pages and immediately reread them because the effect was so powerful. An interview with Perkins has been on the cards (or the books) since The Good Word became required viewing for writers and book lovers, a show that will be sorely missed when the station is closed down in June (boo!). (Photo: Patricia Phelan)

John Sundman is author and publisher of the cyber-nano-biopunk novels Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, and The Pains. After Sundman blogged about selling his books at the hacker convention DEFCON, science fiction author Bruce Sterling described him as “the future of printed fiction”. Sundman lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

The Bridge is one of those books I first read long ago but have no recollection on whose recommendation it was. More unusually, I don’t remember where I was when I read it for the first time. It was published in 1986, when Banks was 32. He apparently told SFX magazine’s Mary Branscombe in 1996 that The Bridge is the intellectual among his bibliography. “It’s the one that went away to university and got a first. I think The Bridge is the best of my books.” As such, he warned against reading it before his other books, which I did.

I love it because it’s a novel in which the writer takes some hair-raising risks.

I have little religious knowledge but then, as the disembodied protagonist of this book says, “Theologians and fathers of the Church cannot confound me, they have no firmer ground on which to stand than I.” I know more about “quantum-jumping to the strange brilliance of total Now” because this book helped me to do it.

When I first read Russell Hoban’s Pilgermann in the early 1980s I still believed in a God who moved in strange ways, even if I was not egocentric enough to think He heeded prayers – an expanding Universe, meetings to convene and all that. I can no longer justify belief in a Supreme Being, but I do believe this book asks vital questions of those who still have faith; questions they neither often nor rigorously enough attempt to answer.

‘”…You’ve said that you want to avail yourself of the action of my mind for a work that you’ve had in your mind. Can you now tell me what this work is?”

“I want you to devise a pattern,” he said.

“What kind of a pattern?” I said.

“With tiles,” he said.

“A pattern with tiles,” I said. “For this have you come to the slave market in Tripoli to find yourself a castrated Jew.”‘

© RUSSELL HOBAN, Pilgermann (first edition, page 115), Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1983

John Lydon couldn’t have become Johnny Rotten if Mervyn Peake hadn’t first created Steerpike, it doesn’t matter whether Lydon ever read Titus Groan. Peake troubled himself to describe the tics that not only make Gormenghast’s denizens come to life but also turn them into supernormal beings; his humour sparks life into them; he makes characters fascinating in the way anything that cannot be fully understood is fascinating. I can think of few other writers courageous enough to glance away from irresistible action to describe “rissoles” of fat on the kitchen floor, but it’s the complexity of Gormenghast that makes it so terrifyingly humdrum; so splendidly real. (Illustration: Mervyn Peake’s Steerpike in ‘Titus Groan’, or Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols?)

“Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Image: saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s solos with Weather Report often featured his improvisations on Bob Hope’s signature tune, ‘Thanks for the Memories’)

Including this, I’ve posted 22 responses to the #Trust30 challenge out of a possible 32 (that’s not quite true; the challenge goes on, reinvigorated by the positive feedback received from the participants). I want to quit while I’m ahead, so thanks for the memories.

“Schultz punching now for his life. Connecting with a straight left ka plonk on Al’s nose which instantly cascaded bleeding blood. Schultz momentarily still and aghast at the horrifying crimson sight of Al’s face. Al undaunted cutting free with a looping right connecting with Schultz’s unblack eye. Schultz hanging on in a clinch.”

JP Donleavy is the ultimate stylist. My proof: few other writers are instantly recognisable from a paragraph taken at random from one of their books. Schultz is the story of theatrical impresario Sigmund Franz ‘Isadorable’ Schultz, a man so dogged by misfortune and his own clumsiness that its first 150 pages wear you down and punch you drunk so you feel you’ve gone 15 rounds with a prize-fighter. My trainer, a grizzled old pro called Sebastian Dangerfield, told me to persevere, to keep getting back up, so I did.

About five years ago I acquired a second-hand, yellowed Penguin paperback of Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words and it’s since become the most often used book in my writer’s reference library. The edition I have has a more attractive cover than any of those I’ve been able to locate on the internet, and its hand-lettered illustration by Jeffrey Fisher (shown here) makes it seem even more special to me. The trouble with most reference works (as Bryson points out in an introduction for the benefit of those afraid that reading any book about words would be about as pleasant as eating it), is that “they so frequently assume from the reader a familiarity with the intricacies of grammar that is – in my case, at any rate – generous”. Troublesome Words can enjoyably and profitably be read from cover to cover as entertainment, rather than just dipped into when needed.

In 1921 Macmillan published a novel by British ghost story writer Oliver Onions (author of The Beckoning Fair One), the today largely forgotten book The Tower of Oblivion. It tells the story of a writer called Derwent Rose, who begins to grow younger instead of older.

The following year, in 1922, celebrated US author F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is The Night) published his short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man born with the appearance of a 70-year-old and who ages backwards until he becomes a baby, in Colliers magazine. Had Fitzgerald read the Oliver Onions book before he wrote his story?