Jeremy Clarkson: my favourite books of all time

I’m delighted that The World According to Clarkson is in the Sunday Times bestseller list, although it is a bit like Slovakia’s national football team reaching the quarter-finals of the Euros. It’s very, very flattering but I wish it had been first. Or 69th. The World According to Clarkson is actually a collection of my Sunday Times columns so people will wonder if the vote was rigged.
Sadly I haven’t had time to sit down and write a proper book for, ooh, 20 years. I used to write non-fiction and it was great fun. I did once write the first chapter of a thriller. The hero was a former army major with a traumatic incident in his past. In my mind he was played by Edward Fox. When he finds himself on the ropes, he’s forced to fight back. The baddies don’t realise what they’re up against, of course. We’ve all read that before. It was unparalleled drivel so I never tried it again.
Sometimes I read at night. There’s an alarm in my hen house that is linked to my phone. If a mink breaks in to attack the hens, or if the alarm goes off by accident, it wakes me up and I read to get back to sleep. I’ve just finished a book about a middle-class marketing executive who is sentenced to 12 years for manslaughter in an American jail. It’s called You Ain’t Got Nothing Coming and it’s really good. The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow, based on his detailed investigation of the US drug trade, is also excellent.
• Read the full list of the top 100 bestsellers of the past 50 years
My favourite book of all time is probably Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, who is a former US Marine. It’s set in 1969 and inspired by his experiences in Vietnam. It’s supposedly a work of fiction but you spend the whole time thinking, whoever wrote this was there. Matterhorn is the code name for a remote military outpost on the Laotian border that falls into enemy hands and Bravo Company is tasked with retaking it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I love Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. I read it when I was actually in Monterey, California. It was foggy and there were sea lions and the boats were coming in. I was living the book while I was reading it — something I’d never done before.
Choosing a book to read on holiday is always tricky. The problem, as I’ve said before, is that if you grab one at the airport it’ll probably be about the search for a hoard of Nazi gold and the cover will show a girl in a bikini, a gold ingot and a swastika, and a speedboat leaping through an explosion of some kind, and it will make you a laughing stock at the pool.
You need something that will make you look intelligent. My best holiday read was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I read in 2012. It begins with a man and a boy walking down a road in cold weather and ends the same way, and it made me feel so cold I had to go and get a jumper, even though l was on a beach in Barbados. The book is not much thicker than a pamphlet but it took me nearly a week to finish. I kept going back over some of the phrases thinking, that didn’t work. But they do work.
Oh, and I’ve just finished a book called The Forgotten Soldier, which is set on the eastern front in the Second World War. You tend to hear about the war from our perspective, or an American or Russian perspective, but you rarely hear about it from a German perspective. It was every bit as bad as you might think. Guy Sajer got to the front just as they started to retreat and things went from bad to worse. It’s a hideously difficult read but it’s worth it. It was published in 1965, so nowadays it’s a forgotten book about a forgotten soldier.
• What the top 100 bestsellers of the past 50 years say about us
For something lighthearted, 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington is about this guy who takes his tiny dog for a walk round the coastal path of Devon and Cornwall. It’s very funny. I’ve read a lot of rock star biographies. I read a lot at school, but not the set texts, obviously. I read Shadow 81, published in 1976, which has a great plot about a jet fighter that’s used to hijack an airliner.
People occasionally ask me if there’s a secret to a successful book and I honestly don’t know, except to write some newspaper columns, cut them out and staple them together. I’m told there’s a fourth collection of my Sunday Times Clarkson’s Farm columns coming out in time for Christmas. The first was Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm, then ’Til the Cows Come Home, then Pigs Might Fly. The other thing I get asked is if I will write an autobiography. The answer is no because I can’t remember anything. My memory is shot. I mean, I can remember little snippets from here and there but not enough to write an autobiography. Andy Wilman, the executive producer on Top Gear and The Grand Tour, should do one. His memory is phenomenal.
I used to make up bedtime stories for my children with titles such as Hannah and Jack and the Friendly Pheasants. Hannah and Jack were brother and sister, a bit like the Famous Five, and the pheasants were their allies in the countryside. If ever they encountered some terrible beast like a fox or a badger the friendly pheasants would help them out. I tried to read them Winnie-the-Pooh but I would end up in fits of giggles and never be able to finish the stories. I wouldn’t say I’m a big reader these days — I don’t have the time. But I still do enjoy getting a good book and getting stuck in.