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 ...

1

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

I dove into Wuthering Heights when I was 15 or 16, and read it in a single sitting, starting in the afternoon and reading late into the night. I was thrilled by the idea of passionate love. It’s a very English novel, very gothic, whereas French romanticism is more rooted in disillusion. We had a big library in our home and my parents let me read ...

2

The Lily of the Valley

Honoré de Balzac

I read this for school, and didn’t fully understand it at the time but I remember that I found it shocking. In contrast to Wuthering Heights, this is romanticism in the French style. It’s the story of an older woman, Henreitte de Mortsaud and a young suitor; they have big conversations, they talk about love, but they never have sex.

3

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

Jean Rhys

A friend of mine recommended this to me in my twenties as a suggestion for a film because Rhys is so good at portraying women’s lives, all of which are in various ways portraits of herself. I love the book, I love the writing, and I love the story of Jean Rhys herself - she was obscure, and unlucky in love for most of her life, and only became fa ...

4

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

I love the structure of The Waves, which I read in my twenties: to make a portrait of someone who is dead, in which each character has their own point of view, felt truly radical. It’s reminiscent of the Mankiewicz movie, The Barefoot Contessa, but like Marcel Proust she is a writer who would be very difficult to adapt in movies. Neither of them ...

5

Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi

My mother suggested I read this as a teenager. I remember crying as I read the book. There is a kind of hope in his account of life in Auschwitz that makes his own life story--Levi committed apparent suicide in 1987--all the more devastating. I was destroyed by that. This book is a little forgotten today, but if I had a child I’d ask them to read ...

6

Angel

Elizabeth Taylor

Angel is the only book I ever adapted into a movie. It’s the ego of a writer who is utterly selfish, like a a portrait of what an artist doesn’t want to become. It’s very funny, very clever, but I now think I should have made it in French.

7

Time Regained

Marcel Proust

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time functions as a key to the whole series, summarizing what’s come before. You can return to Proust at any point, just a few pages can prompt reflection. It’s such a pleasure to read his descriptions of feelings, of characters. It’s like a Bible for people who love literature, and probably impossible to ...

8

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

I read Lolita as a teenager, and would love to reread it from the perspective of these times. Is it a novel in favor of paedophilia or against paedophilia? I think it’s very ambiguous, not least because the reader is in Humbert Humbert’s head. That kind of ambiguity would make it impossible to publish today.

9

A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Roland Barthes

This is a book I turn to when I am stuck or lost. As with Proust, there is always something to learn. I found it in my mother’s library, and I know she was a big fan of the book, so reading it was a way to understand her.

10

Forbidden Colors

Yukio Mishima

All of Mishima’s books are exotic for us occidental people - they’re very Japanese, with themes of sacrifice, of guilt, of cruelty and humility, and a lot of trauma. Being gay was a big deal for Mishima, and here he describes the gay community of the 50s and 60s in Japan. It’s a book I’d love to adapt but I think that’s impossible because ...

1

A is for Activist

Innosanto Nagara

Memorable, often humorous poems that teach the alphabet through activist political examples. Never too early to expose your children to Justice.

2

Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown

Wonderful rhymes and a modernist, surrealist rendition of a childhood bedroom that is so successful it just seems normal.

3

Superman Smashes the Klan

Gene Leun Lang

Lang updates the Superman origin story with an Asian American, antiracist twist. My 7 year old read it three times in a week.

4

Baby Beluga

Raffi

The book is based on a song by Raffi that is lovely and memorable, and I like to sing it while I read the book to my children.

5

Sidekicks

Dan Santat

A graphic novel about a superhero’s pets who are actually superheroes themselves. I love Santat’s visual and narrative style.

6

Madeline

Ludwig Bemelmans

The French have no idea who this Madeline is and I never read her as a boy, but I’ve come around as an adult.

7

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter

The whimsy and charm of Potter’s story and especially her illustrations are truly timeless. I enjoyed this as a child and my son responds too.

8

The Adventures of Polo

Regis Faller

Visually inventive and wildly imaginative, this book is all pictures and no words. It’s like Buster Keaton embodied by Snoopy and drawn by Salvador Dali.

9

Sofia Valdez, Future Prez

Andrea Beaty

We love everything about Andrea Beaty. Her rhyming series about children with amazing futures - which includes Ada Twist, Scientist and Iggy Peck, Architect - is a beacon for our family and, I hope, a preview of the future. And let’s hope we see a woman of color president in our lifetime.

10

Your Personal Penguin

Sandra Boynton

I love this book or really anything by Sandra Boynton. We have so many of her books. But this one with a song by the Monkees’ Davy Jones is the favorite.