I give books for pretty much all occasions. It is an overwhelming deficit.Īs a bookshop owner, I’m a great believer in bringing books to dinner parties. The book I’m most ashamed not to have read I don’t think I’ve ever made it past page 80. I’ve tried several times and frankly I have to lie down every two pages and try to take in what I’ve read.
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I recently met Nina Stibbe and went back to listen to the audiobook of Love, Nina again, and again, I honked like a goose through the whole thing. My father used to say if he were a rich man he would have sent me to laughing school. This story about her childhood in Haiti and her love for both her father and her uncle remains my favourite memoir. It’s a great book, and a great reminder about all we don’t know about other people’s lives.īrother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat. It opened my eyes to how we are judgmental without realising it, and the burden that places on the recipient. I felt like everyone sharpened their knives on JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy I felt everyone sharpened their knives on that book. They embody four decades of the United States in writing so glittering and precise that it manages to overcome the consistently offensive views of the main character. The book that had the greatest influence on meĪs wildly unfashionable as they are, I learned more from reading the Rabbit Angstrom novels of John Updike than anything else. It’s an extraordinary novel – the structure, the characters, the sweep of time.