Shared by JohnH

Links to full list.

I am often asked by journalists for a list of my “favorite
books” –I don’t know what “favorite” means for a
journalist. I treat books as friends; you miss them when you don’t
see them for a while. Perhaps the best test of one’s appreciation for
a novel is whether one craves it at times, enough to reread it.
Rereading a novel is far more enjoyable than reading it for the first
time. Many I have read more than twice, some (like Il deserto dei
tartari, un taxi mauve, Paulina 1881,…), more than five times.

Up to the age of 25, you read wholesale & in a mercenary way,
to "acquire" a possession, to build a "literary
culture", & do not tend to re-read except when necessary.
After 25, you lose your hang-up and start re-reading –and it is
precisely what you re-read that reveals your literary soul, what you
like.

As with friendship: you do not judge friends, you do not mix
business & friendship; I even physically separate literature from
more functional books (different libraries; I feel I am corrupting
literature by having scientific or the philistinic "nonfiction"
in the same area).

Books written after c. 1900

• Dino Buzzati Il deserto dei
  tartari ( As a child, I viewed the world into two types of
  people: those who read the deserto and were therefore
  marked by it, and the rest. Francois Mitterand, who was not my cup
  of tea, seduced me when on the literary panel Apostrophes
  he went on and on passionately talking about the book –“j’ai
  été marqué par ce livre”, he said, his eyes gleaming).

• Albert Cohen Belle du seigneur
  (A Proust, but with a Levantine soul and personal manners, and
  aggressively heterosexual. )

• Valdimir Nabokov Marenshka,
  his (first?) novel, when he was an exile in Berlin, before he became
  complicated. I reread & reread the final scene.

• Patrick Modiano Villa triste
  (“Je m’attachais à elle comme un noyé”).

• Graham Greene The End of the
  Affair