The book I love most is....A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, a dazzlingly inventive speculative novel about culture and technology which is also compelling on a human level. But I’m fickle. That’s just the last novel I fell hard for, in line that goes back through Gifted, The Savage Detectives, Home, all the way to The Magic Faraway Tree.
The book I'm reading right now is ...I’m alternating chapters of The Memory Chalet, a memoir by the historian Tony Judt, and Listen To This, essays by the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross on subjects ranging from Brahms to Bjork to the history of the walking bassline. I’m trying to get back into work mode so now is not the time to be swept away.
The book I'd like to read next is ....Terry Teachout’s biography of Duke Ellington, but unfortunately he’s only up to chapter three. His Louis Armstrong biography, Pops, was one of the best things I read last year, and now he teases his fans with progress reports on Twitter.
The book that changed me is ...After Z-Hour by Elizabeth Knox. The Vintner’s Luck is her most famous book, but it was over the manuscript of her first novel that we first met 25 years ago (so perhaps I’m not fickle in everything).
The book I wish I'd never read is ....Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. Usually if I persevere with a bad book it’s because it’s teaching me something about the world, or about how books can go wrong, but that one just left me ashamed.
This feature was originally published in the Herald on Sunday, 6 February 2011.
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