Favourite Book

This week / Last week...

(depending on when you read this, because weeks have a funny way of running on, like cabbages down a gangplank)

...I was asked by Leicester Libraries to name my favourite book...

(not just me, other people as well, even YOU! if you want and you click this little linky-link, no here (DUMBO)!)

...as part of the National Year of Reading...

(which I’ve mentioned before here)

((Sorry can I you stop doing that?))

(what?)

((The interrupting. It’s v. annoying.))

(“V annoying”! And using “v” isn’t annoying??? It’s so pretenti...)

((STOP!!!!))

(Blimey!)

...and I thought, that’s difficult, choosing just the one book. Because there are loads and different books suit different moods.


My favourite book is Alice in Wonderland but you can’t say that because everyone says that although George Saunders has written an essay about how much he loves Huckleberry Finn so I might give it a proper go sometime. (Huckleberry Finn is the kind of book that most Americans will say is their favourite book, and it is mighty fine.)

I read everything George Saunders writes and anything he does would be up there with my favourite books. He’s funny and wise and a genius in that order. To tell you how much I love him I read all of one of his pieces out loud in bed the other night and laughed so much that the neighbour put a ladder up to my window to see if I was ok. I was so surprised I fell out of bed, somehow managed to roll all the way down the stairs and out of the front door, knocking the bottom of the ladder so my neighbour fell on top of me. His girlfriend just happened to be filming it and is sending it into the new ITV show, Neighbours You’ve Never Met Until A Funny Thing Happened and You Did. It’s going to be hosted by Amy Winehouse.

(Drew’s boyfriend interrupting - “That’s the most exciting thing you’ve done in bed for quite some time by the way.”)

George Saunders is someone whose style I try to copy. (Top tip for writers!) I wonder if that’s a basis for most of my favourite writers. Regular readers of this blog will know I am currently working on my new book and on a shelf below my desk here is Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov. When I am struggling I pick it up and read a bit. It’s absurd but also fast paced and incredibly laconic. It makes me want to cut bits out. (My new book has penguins in but before you mount any bandwagons it’s nothing like Kurkov.)

To make up the triptych the final writer who I would most like to plagiarise is Arthur Bradford who wrote a short story collection called Dogwalker. The stories in Dogwalker are short but also full of plots that go all over the place. That’s what I want too. Again I am not him! I write about disabled people, him disabled dogs. Got that?

Some writers you know you will never be as good as. Scott Rudin said on Front Row this week that the biggest disappointment of his movie producing career was when the deal for Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay fell through. That is just the best book, about the holocaust, an escape artist, the history of comic books in America and Hollywood. It is heartbreaking. There is one point in the book where you think one of the characters is going to die. You just have to look ahead to know if he is going to be alright. Or not.

Other writers just continually surprise you. Rupert Thomson’s biggest problem is that perhaps he writes different books each time. The last was Death of a Murderer, about Myra Hindley although she is never mentioned. The one before that was Divided Kingdom - a kind of sci-fi novel set in a divided England (divided into sections according to your perceived personality type). My favourite three though are Air and Fire (a western set in Baja California about the building of a church designed by Eiffel), The Insult (a thriller about a man who is blind (or not)), and Five Gates of Hell (interwoven stories in an alternative society in which the funeral parlour owners are the Bill Gates of their days).

And I realise that I am rather going on.

(Yes, you are!)

I just wanted to mention McSweeneys 12, a regular short story anthology but this one is dedicated to new writers. I like this not only because it has fold out flaps which have eye-holes through which you can see a hippo but also because it has some really great stories. My favourite one is Charities by Steven Stiefel and also in the section of it not dedicated to new writers is a Roddy Doyle story about the family from the Barrytown trilogy.

(Is that it??)

((Yes except to say the shelf is currently packed with other books just waiting to be read - Submarine by Joe Dunthorne, Donjong Heights by Ben Borek (a novel in verse from the lovely Eggbox publishing - it’s a beautiful looking book if you give a shit about that kind of thing), Brace, a collection of short stories from short stories publisher Comma Press, Day by AL Kennedy, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo (this one’s a gay Finnish man who meets a troll that makes him irresistible!)

So that’s it.

(Thank fuck!)

Currently reading The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders

Currently listening to Sade