Patrick Hennessey's debut, The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and
Fighting Wars, is being published as a trade
paperback original by
Riverhead Books (September 7, 2010). The war memoir spent eight weeks on the London Sunday
Times bestseller list and was named Book of the Year by the Independent
when it was published in the U.K. last year.
Hennessey joined the British army shortly graduating Oxford in 2004, and completed officer training at Sandhurst (Britain's equivalent of West Point), where he was awarded the Queen's Medal. He served in the Balkans, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Falkland Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan. Hennessey, now living in London, is studying law and hopes to specialize in conflict and international humanitarian law.
On
your nightstand now:
I'm afraid I'm a bit greedy and tend to have lots of books on the go at once. I'm currently reading William Langewiesche's Aloft, which I'm hugely enjoying for the brilliant, spare prose as much as the fascinating way it deals with flying, something so conventional and yet so wonderful. Also on the go I've got George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here, a brilliant memoir of a soldier in Burma in the Second World War, and Roberto Bolano's 2666, which I'm finally getting round to after much hype and recommendation. They're all being propped up (literally) by Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, which just arrived and which I can't wait to get stuck into.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I'm reliably informed I wouldn't go to sleep without a reading from the Reverend W. Awdrey's Thomas the Tank Engine books. I've kept them all, they're brilliant.
Your top five authors:
I'm hopeless at these sort of lists so I've taken the coward's option and refined this to my top five "war" authors; Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Heller (Catch 22) are both definitely there, as are Robert Graves for his First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That, and probably Michael Herr for Dispatches. Evelyn Waugh gets the last slot for his Sword of Honour trilogy and because he's probably one of my "top fives" generally as well but that leaves out so many brilliant writers of conflict--Homer, Tolstoy, Swofford, etc.--that I already feel bad.
Book you've faked reading:
I got away for most of university without having read any Jane Austen (always helps when there are lavish BBC adaptations to help you bluff it) and once wrote an essay on Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater based on the blurb on the back. As a former British officer who spent time in the Middle East, I'm ashamed to say I still haven't read T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom; maybe now I'm out of the army I'll have the time, although it may not be so useful.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. Like Ulysses, this is often unfairly dubbed a difficult book to read, but it's well worth the effort. One of the most humorous and human novels ever written. I've also been talking up Ayn Rand, who is barely read in the U.K. You don't have to agree with The Fountainhead, but I think it's a pretty energizing read.
Book you've bought for the cover:
In the U.K., Hamish Hamilton recently reissued a set of five Raymond Chandlers with the original hardback covers. I fell straight for the smoking revolver of The Big Sleep and am thankful that I did as it finally got me into Chandler, and I haven't looked back.
Book that changed your life:
It's more a whole bunch of books by the writers loosely termed "the Brideshead Generation." At school it was devouring the works of Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and their contemporaries that made me want to study English at Oxford and Balliol (my college) in particular. If I had to pick one book, it would be Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint, which seemed to me at 17 so perfect that the only option was to try and follow in Huxley's footsteps, which I did.
Favorite line from a book:
Sticking with the military theme, it's difficult to look beyond the devastatingly effective "So it goes" from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. On a lighter note, I think there's something wonderfully optimistic about the climactic "yes I said yes I will Yes" that triumphantly finishes James Joyce's Ulysses.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A toss-up between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies--both darker than you think but for some reason I find them both very comforting.
Author photo: Sebastian Meyer/Polaris Images