Geoff Dyer: ‘I don’t go to books for comfort; I have a memory foam pillow for that’

The author on Marxist revelations, returning to Don DeLillo and reading all of Elizabeth TaylorMy earliest reading memory Beatrix Potter when I was having my tonsils out. No point saying how much I loved her books because everyone does, but Roberto Calasso makes a brilliant point in The Celestial Hunter by pairing “two great moments in the Victorian age” when Darwin “linked human beings to primates” and Potter “distributed human behaviour among a certain number of small domestic and rural animals”.My favourite book growing upThe Guns of Navarone. My first Alistair MacLean, the first of about 20 before I grew out of him at the age of 15. They were thrilling and addictive and it was possible, while reading, to visualise every scene so clearly (helped in part by the scene-enacting photos on the covers of the Fontana editions). Continue reading...

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