Philip Pullman has become the second selector – after Sebastian Faulks – to choose a “Writer’s Table” of 40 favourite books for Waterstone’s. As if we needed to be told, the imagination that soared from a parallel Oxford to Svalbard and Cittagazze draws its own dark materials from a galaxy of genius that makes the word “eclectic” sound pinched. His fiction options swoop from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks to John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy by way of Kleist’s Marquise of O, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, HG Wells, PG Wodehouse and HP Lovecraft.
Poetry spans Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elizabeth Bishop and nursery rhymes. Children’s works include Hergé’s Tintin and Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls. Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose bat for superstition-busting science; William James excavates The Varieties of Religious Experience. An awkward squad of oddball masterworks features Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, the comic columns of Flann O’Brien, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. This Top 40 (listed at www.waterstones.com/writerstable) is a cultural education in itself, conducted by a rebel academy of strong-minded mavericks and spell-binding storytellers.