Favourite writers

Relaxing on the Nothe spectator area in Weymouth after watching the sailing Olympics, I fell into conversation with an engaging (and attractive) english lit graduate who asked me who were my favourite authors. My mind suddenly went blank - like someone who's been slapped across the face with a wet fish and is too stunned to answer. I have now retreated, regrouped and examined my conscience - as the Catholics say. At the top of the list, I'd place myself of course: patchy, but not bad when on form (I jest). Below that, the order keeps changing. At the moment. it includes James Joyce, John Updike - in spite of the late Gore Vidal's hatred of him, Philip Roth, Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami, Herman Melville, WG Sebald, Cormac McCarty, John McGahern, Frank O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, Maeve Binchy, Martin Amis, Ruth Rendell, Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith (a friend - I was listed in the 'Compliments' as one of the first readers of On Beauty), Ali Smith, Citizen Smith (!), Charles Dickens, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Fernando Pessoa, and others that I must have forgotten. Not one for reading one author to the exclusion of all others, I've read more Murakami recently than any other author. I still can't make up my mind about his work, which is about the best compliment I can pay - I value ambivalence. I did mention a Dickens and one or two others. She said 'in that case. you must read Balzac'. I shall, as soon as I finish this Amis, I'll try a sample of his work- if there are any libraries still open then. The list will of course change regularly.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that this young Romanian wrote her dissertation on Frank McCourt's 'Angela's Ashes'. As it happens, I had a long and wide-ranging chat with Frank at a friends's book launch (Nick Laird) in London about six months before Frank died. I was really taken with Frank's natural warmth and humanity and was very sad to learn of his subsequent passing.