1

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

 This conflated translation offered entry into this great work beyond Swann’s Way and into the heart of the work, as the famous translation didn’t. The distance of the language, the coldness, separated me from the deep examination of myself, forcing me to read and reread more carefully, then push me to leap forward, as hurtful and embarrassing ...

2

Frog

Stephen Dixon

Dixon was shortlisted twice for the National Book Award, yet could not maintain a publisher because of money. He told me that he knew how they wanted him to write, but he wouldn’t do it. He was so good.

3

Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry

Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann

This is an important guide to world poetry.

4

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

Simply one of the greatest novels ever written.

5

Major Works of Charles Dickens (Boxed Set)

Charles Dickens

Try reading it aloud; to your self to a group, to a crowd. He was born to connect with humanity.

6

Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

Anonymous

I dare you to stop reading after the first three stories.

7

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His imagination translates magic into reality, pretty good trick.

8

Shakespeare: Invention of the Human

Harold Bloom

He was a friend and mentor. Of his many books, this is a favorite, full of insights and passion draw me back to it again and again.

9

The Oxford English Dictionary

I love to leaf through a dictionary.

10

History of Art

Horst W. Janson 

Essential to an understanding of common humanity. *Note: this is shipped as a used book.

1

Trick Mirror

Jia Tolentino

This was required reading in the You writers’ room. Tolentino has a gift for taking apart cultural phenomena to show you the problematic bits. Reading it gave me a sense of relief, because she can so precisely explain why something like Sweetgreen salad makes me angry.

2

Life on Mars

Tracy K. Smith

I can’t read “Aubade” without crying. The dog gets me every time.

3

Misery

Stephen King

In 2020, I listened to 16 of his books in a row on long walks. Having the shit scared out of me really calms my anxiety. I especially love when King traps his protagonist – keeping the story in a tight box forces it deeper into the character’s psyche.

4

Proof

David Auburn

Not a wasted word. Sometimes I’ll be stopped at a red light and suddenly start thinking about “connecting the dots.”

5

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman

The first time a dentist gave me nitrous oxide, I saw the skeleton of the universe. So now when I get dental work, I take advantage of the altered state to investigate the question I like to dwell on at 3 a.m.: where do we go after we die? This book posits 40 possibilities. The vignettes are thoughtful, sometimes freaky, and a delight even if you� ...

6

Crush

Richard Siken

His poetry feels like driving fast on a bad road in the rain, and that is a way I want poetry to feel. (This would also be at the top of my list of favorite cover art. I mean, look at it. Jesus Christ.)

7

An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks

Sacks’s writing is compassionate and elegant, and makes me like people more as a species.

8

Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence

Nick Bantock

An epistolary novel so creative it practically vibrates in your hands. Turning the page to see the next postcard or letter is thrillingly immediate— a couple of times, I gasped. And pulling a handwritten note out of an envelope addressed to someone else feels slightly illegal.

9

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m so lucky that I came to this book without knowing anything about it. If you’re as lucky, go read it. If you’ve heard about the plot or seen the film, I’ll just say: when I think of the writing, I picture the pages gently glowing, like an object that has been touched by the Divine.

10

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

I like how transgressive and wrong this book is and I’m not sorry.

1

Peasants and Other Stories

I revere Chekhov as a writer – of short stories. And I’m absolutely fascinated by the man himself, also. Any volume of Chekhov’s mature stories – the ones he wrote in the last ten years of his life – will contain masterworks but if you only had to read one Chekhov story then his longest, “My Life”, will open the door to his particular ...

2

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

This is a unique novel. How often can you say that? A 999-line poem with hundreds of pages of completely wrong-headed footnotes. Only Nabokov could have pulled off this extraordinary feat of narration (and beautiful poetry, it has to be said). Mesmerising prose – and also very funny indeed.

3

A Far Cry from Kensington

This is perhaps Muriel Spark’s most autobiographical novel but it is also a great exemplar of her extraordinary gifts. The tone of voice is perfect – sly, deadpan, brusque – which is what gives her fiction such “zing”. Her heroine, Mrs Hawkins, is a wonderfully shrewd self-portrait. Formidable.

4

Our Mutual Friend

This is Dickens’s last completed novel and arguably his finest and darkest. It is also the great novel of London. Written and published in the 1860s, the portrait of the city still – amazingly — resonates in the 21st century.

5

Poems

Elizabeth Bishop

Bishop is in my personal Pantheon of poets (along with W.H.Auden, Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens and a few choice others). What’s remarkable is just how small Bishop’s corpus of work is. Her huge reputation rests on a mere seventy or so published poems. They are perfectly wrought, often labored-over for years. The precision of language is sensa ...

6

Scoop

This could be the perfect comic novel – the misadventures of a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Order disturbed, chaos and disorder, order restored. Waugh’s immaculate deadpan prose is amazing and the book is extremely funny. The chapter detailing Mr Salter’s visit to Boot Magna in darkest England is the funniest piece of comic ...

7

Couples

This is not regarded as Updike’s best novel but when I read it in my early 20s it blew me away. Suddenly I saw the human condition depicted with a clarity – and beauty – that I hadn’t experienced before. It is a pure distillate of the Updike-ian world-view.

8

The Life of Henry Brulard

This isn’t the Life of Henry Brulard – it’s a pseudonym, swiftly discarded. It’s actually the life of Henri Beyle, aka “Stendhal”, and is one of the most extraordinary autobiographies ever written, up there with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions. Candid, tormented, passionate, outspoken – the man who was Stendhal comes vibrant ...

9

The Bottle-Factory Outing

I knew Beryl Bainbridge a little and I think she is a most underrated British novelist. Like Muriel Spark her take on the world and its denizens is amazingly clear-eyed. And like Spark, again, she sees oddness and eccentricity as the defining features of human relationships. Very funny and very true at the same time.

10

The Heart of the Matter

I read this novel in my teens and it opened my eyes to the transforming power of fiction. I was born and raised in West Africa and West Africa (in WW2) is the setting for the story. Here were landscapes, people, situations, sights and smells I knew intimately, transformed and immortalised by a novelist’s skilful hand. I think this book was the on ...

1

Society Within

Courttia Newland

The first book I read that was adjacent to the world in which I lived. It’s about a girl on a west London housing estate, who is a conduit to the lives of all the other people in her orbit. Until reading this, I didn’t realize that books in which I could recognize people from my own life, could be written.

2

Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari

I was drawn to the book because of the subtitle: A History of Tomorrow. It had been a year since I left church and I was having what I now understand was an existential crisis and spinning out of my mind: what the fuck is going on, where am I, what is happening? I didn’t understand anything because I’d so whole-heartedly adopted the Bible’s a ...

3

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson

Because it helped me give less of a fuck.

4

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

Originally published in China in 2006, but now translated into English, this took me about eight months to read because I had to keep going back. It’s a book that I struggle to explain—it flashes back and forth in time over a million years and across solar systems—but it totally helped me escape this planet. It’s not offering a utopian visi ...

5

The Dark Forest

Liu Cixin

The second in Liu’s trilogy (see above), that takes off in new and wonderful ways.

6

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

The story of a mouse in a lab undergoing an experiment to make it more intelligent is juxtaposed with a parallel story in which Charlie Gordon, a cleaner in a bakery with learning difficulties, undergoes the same experiment. It may mean different things to different people; for me it was about what you lose when you trade naivete for intelligence� ...

7

Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut

Reading this reminded me of people who approach life like a video game, without consequence. I love it so much that I included a homage to Kurt Vonnegut in I May Destroy You, in episode two when Arabella is at the clinic and meets a woman who is covered in blood, having been assaulted. The woman says, ‘Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts,� ...

8

Exhalation

Ted Chiang

I’m usually drawn to novels, but this beautifully-written collection of short stories was recommended by the same person who recommended Three-Body Problem, and they weren’t wrong.

9

Poor

Caleb Femi

I’ve never read about life on a housing estate written with such beauty. Femi is a poet, and this is a combination of short stories and poems and photography, and—a little like Society Within--it’s about life for people in working class London who are Black, so again it’s a book in which I saw myself.

10

The Book of Eels

Patrik Svensson 

I never thought I would see myself in an eel, until I read Svensson’s beautiful book, in which he anthropomorphizes eels and shows how mysterious they are, and how little we know about them. It’s a beautiful book that makes you realize that the eel is our cousin—we are the eel, and the eel is us.

1

Independent People

Halldor Laxness

What a masterpiece of a novel. I’ve recommended this book with enthusiasm to so many people and almost none of them have managed to get through it. I have no idea why. It’s funny and brutal and transportive. It’s about a crofter in Iceland putting his poor family through the wringer so he can prove he is an independent, self-sufficient man. A ...

2

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

Oh God, this book. It almost made me a believer in middle American Christian goodness. Talk about a feat of imagination and compassion. There’s something about the voice of John Ames that makes me cry just thinking about it. He is a fiction but I don’t care, I love him. Glory be to God.

3

The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard

This is theory - and French, no less - at its best. It is not “deconstructing” poetry - it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.

4

Love and Death in the American Novel

Leslie Fiedler

If Bachelard is theory at its best, this is criticism at its best. So funny and inspired and bursting with ideas. I am jealous of anyone who has not read this book - because reading this for the first time is like going on a literary thrill ride through the tropes of our culture. Is it all true? Who cares? It will jiggle your mind and broom out the ...

5

In the Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm

I think I have read every published sentence of Janet Malcolm. She is non-fiction prose at its sadistic finest. Talk about assuming the intelligence of the reader. She suffers no fools. I chose this book because I share her love for the writings of Freud - for Freud, like her, wanted to crack open the reader’s skull and leave a permanent mark on ...

6

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

Like the voice of John Ames, the melancholy Bernardo Soares stays with you forever. I love the values of this book - inertia, passivity, confusion. What an antidote to most things we read. Following around this civil servant as he journals about his mundane, depressing life, I feel weirdly giddy with life’s possibilities. We should all have heter ...

7

Outline Trilogy

Rachel Cusk

The most uncanny and sober of fever dreams. What the fuck are these books? Why did I chew through them - as if they were the most compelling of murder mysteries - yet nothing ever happens and I can’t remember a thing after putting them down?  Dissociative perambulations but written with such urgency. These books cast a spell on me. Maybe Rachel ...

8

The Scorpion Fish

Nicolas Bouvier

There are so many travel writers I love - hard to choose one. But Nicolas Bouvier’s writing is unmatched and this book is a major freak-out. Stuck in Galle, Sri Lanka - he loses his mind as he watches strange tropical bugs invade his squalid hotel room. He is in a haunted colonial Hell and the whole time I’m reading, I just wish I could be ther ...

9

A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul

Speaking of colonial Hells! This is such a strange, grim, beautifully rendered book. Its nihilism about the human condition is so convincing! (And if that’s not a glowing recommendation, I don’t know what is - lol!) It’s hard to call this a “favorite” book but it has stayed with me longer than most. Ugh.

10

My Lives

Edmund White

So many gay writers have influenced me - Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Stephen Sondheim, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde yadda yadda. I also wanted to include an autobiography. Edmund White is a great writer - so erudite, curious about all things, a great aesthete. And as honest as anyone can be about sex and the motivations of self. Honesty is everythin ...