Salil Patel

Bookshelf

Writers I adore. Incomplete, and in no particular order.

Writers & works

  1. Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway, and the diariesObviously. See About.
  2. Primo Levi — If This Is a Man / The Periodic TableA chemist who survived Auschwitz and wrote it down with a chemist's precision.
  3. Italo Calvino — Invisible CitiesI keep buying copies of Invisible Cities and giving them away.
  4. Jorge Luis Borges — LabyrinthsA library containing every possible book; a man who rewrites Don Quixote word for word.
  5. Douglas Hofstadter — Gödel, Escher, BachA gift when I was thirteen from my next-door neighbour, Graham Hoare, over one of our weekly teas. I have never stopped reading it.
  6. John Donne — Poems and devotionsLove poems and sermons, sometimes in adjacent lines. The conceits are load-bearing.
  7. Zadie Smith — Feel FreeI read the essays before the novels, and still prefer them.
  8. Merve Emre — The criticismHer Annotated Mrs Dalloway is the edition I keep to hand.
  9. Katherine Rundell — Super-InfiniteHer life of Donne sent me back to the poems.
  10. Julian Barnes — The booksThe Sense of an Ending is short. I go back to it.
  11. Salman Rushdie — The booksMidnight's Children is the one. I read the rest out of loyalty.
  12. W. H. Auden — Selected poemsThere is a great deal more to him than “Funeral Blues”.
  13. John Keats — The letter on Negative CapabilityHe named Shakespeare's gift, negative capability, in a letter dashed off to his brothers in 1817.
  14. Philip Larkin — Selected poemsNobody has written better about time running out.
  15. Evelyn Waugh — The novels and satiresScoop is still the truest book about journalism. I am only half joking.
  16. J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the RingsHe built the myths, the languages and the maps first, then wrote the story that could stand on them.
  17. Robert Macfarlane — UnderlandHe writes about landscape the way other people write about people.
  18. Michael Palin — Diaries and travel writingFifty years of diaries, kept almost daily.
  19. P. G. Wodehouse — Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings, and beyondSentences engineered to watchmaker's tolerances.
  20. William Finnegan — Barbarian DaysI reread it most summers.
  21. Ed Yong — An Immense WorldAn Immense World is the best science book of the past decade. I say this with some professional envy.
  22. Ann Wroe — LifescapesShe calls obituary writing “catching souls”. Lifescapes explains how it is done.

Other loves

(And, above all, Imogen.)