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.
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Top 10 fantasy books
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
- Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb
- The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- Ship of Destiny by Robin Hobb
- Nation by Terry Pratchett
- Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
- A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
Top 10 children's fantasy books
- The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
- The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson
- The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson
- Stick Man by Julia Donaldson
- Time To Wash Faces! by Andrew Davenport
- Come To Tea On Planet Zum Zee by Tony Mitton
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Lost And Found by Oliver Jeffers
- The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
- The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
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The Spook's Apprentice
The Spook's Curse
The Spook's Secret
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