The Wyrd, the Wild, and Wondrous

by Lee Morgan
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8 books
This list isn’t so much about books, but about the immortal emotions that reverberated out from someone else and inspired my own life and work in some way. These are books, but to me, they breathe, and sometimes they cry out in the night, needing me to hold them.
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Gould's Book of Fish

A Novel in Twelve Fish
Richard Flanagan, 2002
In the tradition of Tasmanian Gothic this is probably my favourite novel of all time, for a variety of reasons. When a strange book, one that tells a ruthless story of truth and oddity and leaves purple and iridescent marks on the fingers, shows up inside a piece of antique furniture, there is no escaping the errant out-pouring of Billy Gould. Both passionately beautiful, and ironic and gorgeously over-blown, all at the same time, this book left a well-tattooed in mark on me.

Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice, 2010
This is a book that began me. Both as a person, as an adult, and as a writer. As a teen I was obsessed with Anne Rice and her world of the sympathetic monster. A classic of monumental proportions, Interview with the Vampire is made all the more interesting by the recent TV series, one that Anne Rice helped to develop before she died. Although it isn’t part of the original material the idea developed further in the show of Louis as an unreliable narrator makes this book a treat to read and re-read. Rice’s novel was an enormous influence on my first novel Wooing the Echo, that I wrote in my early twenties.

All the Light We Cannot See

A Novel
Anthony Doerr, 2014
This book is one of the few that brought me to tears. A book about a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France and a boy obsessed with light, two strange souls who find each other for a moment, even while everything else falls apart around them. This is also a harrowing tale about all the good, noble and ordinary people who just didn’t make it through that war.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, 2009
I read this book very early in life and it haunted me and my early work, just as Cathy haunts Heathcliff. The obsessive and darkly passionate relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff was the first love story of intense magnitude I read about in a book. It was so hurtfully dear to me I have read this entire book aloud to a willing participant!

Flames

Robbie Arnott, 2018
Also could be classed as Tasmanian Gothic, but with a surrealist tinge that makes it more like Magic Realism. The language in this book is sublime, and it is any animistic-thinking person’s wet dream, in that everything from the flames of a bushfire to water rats all have a consciousness as fully alive and awake as our own. In this story women from a particular family come back to life when touched by flame.

The Philosophers' Secret Fire

A History of the Imagination
Patrick Harpur, 2007
This book and Calasso’s one mentioned below were huge influences for me in writing non-fiction. I wanted to capture that sense of telling a story about things that really happened, but in a way that participates in the mythic life of that happening. Harpur does a great job of that here, riffing on various themes to tease out the idea of imagination being fed by a daimonic surge of hermetic fire.

The God of Small Things

A Novel
Arundhati Roy, 2011
They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the rules that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.’ In part an Indian Wuthering Heights, this book is gentle and cruel at the same time. Arundhati Roy is so much more than a writer, she is also a very courageous activist and political figure for whom I hold a great respect.

Literature and the Gods

Roberto Calasso, 2010
This book, like Harpur’s walks that line between non-fiction, fiction, and even literary criticism. It is so beautiful to read that some people struggle to take it seriously, but for me personally it was more like being caressed into caring about the work of people like Baudelaire and Mallarmé when I was still young enough to be discovering them for the first time. Though unable to read them in their original language Calasso made me feel their essence with his work.