Stephen Fry has never shied away from a good book. A lifelong bookworm, Fry’s connection to stories spans everything from his celebrated narration of the Harry Potter series to his own bestselling memoirs and novels.
With an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture, politics, science, history, and humour, Fry is the kind of person whose reading list you’d expect to include Cicero, Wilde and PG Wodehouse… but who’s just as likely to quote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Ulysses.
So when Fry sat down in 2018 to appear on the BBC’s long-running book programme A Good Read, alongside Alan Davies, there was a certain expectation that he wouldn’t pick something safe as his one recommendation.
“I’ve chosen Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World – I guess his best-known book, and one of the best dystopias,” Fry told presenter Harriett Gilbert. “I think that’s the correct term for these dark visions of the future. It’s a book I read in my teens, like a lot of people I think – it’s a very popular book. And perhaps it’s the type of book people know about more than they remember. That’s the case with me.”
Set in a technologically advanced future where individuality has been sacrificed for a rigid system of engineered happiness, Brave New World imagines a society where people are mass-produced in hatcheries, pacified by the drug soma, and conditioned to embrace mindless pleasure over meaning. It’s a world without pain – or love – where discomfort is removed by design. Its eerily cheerful tone is what sets it apart from other dystopias. Everything looks fine on the surface, and that’s what makes it terrifying.
Fry explained his choice had everything to do with the changing technological world around him: “I’ve become aware that we are on the brink of an extraordinary leap forward in technology. Not just robotics or AI, but also genetics and genomics and gene editing and brain-machine interfacing and all kinds of frightening things, quite existential for our future.”
Unlike Orwell’s 1984, Fry argued, which is about tyranny and state control, “famously a boot going down on the face forever”, Huxley’s version of dystopia is more appealing: “Brave New World is about making others happy. It’s giving them what they want. So I was really excited to get back to it.”
“The thing that startled me [when re-reading it] was how funny it is. It’s a very witty book, I think. Not everybody will think that, perhaps, but it’s full of clever little jokes about science, and about literature and culture, and games, and people who are encouraged to play games. There’s centrifugal bumble-puppy, which I think is a fantastic game, and electromagnetic golf…”
But Fry’s literary tastes don’t stop at dystopian fiction. Over the years, he’s publicly shared many of his favourite books, adding up to a reading list that sprawls across genres, centuries and continents.
The title Fry often calls the most influential in his life is Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. “Oddly enough” Fry said, “although it’s a kind of bleak book and a warning about the kind of person I don’t want to be. It’s an intense book like Ulysses, another favourite book, that takes place all in one day. The author is Malcolm Lowry, a Canadian-British author – it’s about a drunken consul on the day of death in Mexico. That’s something about it I find hypnotically magnificent, and I go back and re-read it a lot.”
When ShelterBox asked him to name a favourite novel by a non-Western writer, Fry immediately went to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: “Insanely enjoyable, with some emphasis on the insanely,” he said. “There’s a demented quality to the surreal and twisted nature of so much that goes on in it… so many scenes stay with you forever, a bit like the euphoric flashbacks from an acid trip (so they tell me).”
On David Eagleman’s genre-defying work Sum, Fry made one of his boldest bets: “You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman’s Sum. If you read it and aren’t enchanted, I will eat 40 hats.”