Caitlin Moran's Reading List

"We were too poor for holidays, so I holidayed in Narnia in my head, instead. Aslan was the sexy pivotal lion in my life, plus it’s made all wardrobes unexpectedly and lingeringly exciting."

"Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet."

"I would have done it with every character in HHGTTG in turn. Even Marvin, the Paranoid Android. Nerdy, liberal, wry, sci-fi and dazzlingly inventive, before that was the fashionable thing to be. Forget the film. Adore the book that invented the iPhone (The Guide) and Google Translate (the Babel fish)"

"A history of British food that has the same, odd, dreamy, lysergic air as Through The Looking Glass . Takes you through an England of roast swans, possets, syllabubs, gold-leaf jellies, boiled elvers, and elderflower fritters."

"Once you put aside the matter of OH MY GOD THE SLAVERY JESUS LOOK AT ALL THE FREAKING SLAVERY STOP WITH THE SLAVERY, MAN, the core concept of this book is amazing. It the most famous teen literature ever – Scarlett is 16 when the Civil War kicks off, and what keeps her going through the complete destruction of her family, status and life is her unrequited love for Ashley Wilkes. The idea of that kind of demented fantasy – let’s face it, Ashley’s a drip – keeping you going through awful years..."

"I’m sure, if you scan people’s brains, you can see the bit that lights up if you’ve read Alice In Wonderland. It is actually a cruelty for a human being not to be able to float down the river and meet the knitting sheep in the bulrushes."