Party Going by Marcel Proust
Think of a book. Then imagine someone other than the author who might – or could never – have written it.
Fear of Flying by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Across the River and into the Trees by Albert Camus
Present at the Creation by Richard Dawkins
Bleak House by Anna Wintour
Party Going by Marcel Proust
Indecision by Leon Wieseltier
Finnegans Wake by Maeve Binchy
Catch-22 by Gustave Flaubert
I Married a Communist by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Lucky Jim by Jane Austen
A Brief History of Time by Henry Luce
Fire in The Lake by Gordon Ramsay
Down and Out in Paris and London by Diana Cooper
On the Waterfront by Max Beerbohm
The Wisdom of Crowds by Elias Canetti
Tender is the Night by Mario Batali
Everything is Illuminated by Bill Buford
All The President’s Men by Jacqueline Susann
My Family and Other Animals by William Jennings Bryan
On The Road by Xavier de Maistre
A Voyage Round My Room by Jack Kerouac
White Teeth by Martin Amis
The Colour Purple by John Milton
The Man Without Qualities co-authored by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, translated into Italian by Berlusconi
Journal of the Plague Year by Hugh Pennington
Can we have movies?
Speed by Robert Bresson
Speed 2 by Tarkovsky
The Nice and the Good by Marquis de Sade
The Waves by Vidal Sassoon
Dubliners by Hugh MacDiarmid
I Am a Camera by Jackson Pollock
Ash-Wednesday by Tuesday Weld
The Maximus Poems by Basho
Under the Volcano by Mary Beard
Living by Edgar Allan Poe
Diary of a Nobody by Salman Rushdie
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by George Bush
Green Eggs and Ham by Heston Blumenthal
Where the Wild Things Are by Beatrix Potter
Naked Lunch by Barbara Pym
The Rules by Lord Byron
120 Days of Sodom by John Major
The Rough Guide to Cape Town by Jenny Diski
Loving by Jackie Collins
Women in Love by Sarah Waters
Great Expectations by Samuel Beckett
The Selfish Gene by Betsy Blair
Everybody’s Autobiography by Montaigne
Don Quixote by Dick Francis
Apology for the Woman Writing by A S Byatt
Long Walk to Freedom by Jeffrey Archer
The Jungle Book by David Attenborough
I Write What I Like by Peter Hitchens
Tales of the City by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Fat Chance by Stephen Fry
Portrait of a Lady by Jade Goody
Little Women – Henry Miller
The Good Soldier – Andy McNab
Goodbye Mr Chips – Joseph Conrad
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old but add–
Jenny Diski.
Peter Pan by Vladimir Nabokov
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Italo Calvino
2666 by Dan Brown
The Taming of the Shrew by Henry James
Sex for Dummies by Benedict XVI
The Discovery of France bt Julian Barnes
The Wind in the Willows by Ian Rankin
101 Uses for a Dead Cat by Christopher Smart
King Solomon’s Mines by Frantz Fanon
Goodbye to All That by Marcel Proust
The Name of the Rose by Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock
The Long Goodbye by Tony Blair
Lolita by Silvio Berlusconi
Rebecca by Victoria Beckham
Hunger by Michael Winner
Vineland by Ernest and Julio Gallo
The 39 Steps by Tim Robbins and Deepak Chopra
Sorry, that should be Anthony Robbins
I’m confused and stupid. I really can’t work out whether Proust might, or could never, have written Party Going. Likewise Flaubert’s Catch-22.
I’d like to read All The Pretty Horses by Katie Price.
Nor can I, to be honest… Party Going by Emily Dickinson would be more like it. Or else Tara Palmer-Tompkinson.
I think the idea is that Proust’s extensive experience as a party-goer/social-climber/fop-about-Paris might have been deployed in the writing of a more vulgar and racy (and entertaining?) novel than the one he actually produced.
(Yes, I know–an explained joke is a failed joke.)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Mary Whitehouse
The Tobacco Shop by Alberto Caeiro (if you allow poems)