Jan Morris's Reading List

The author, most recently, of “Ciao, Carpaccio!” recently found in her old copy of “Anna Karenina,” in an “evidently intoxicated scrawl,” the inscription “THIS IS THE BETS BOOK I HAVE EVER READ.”

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By the Book: Jan Morris (2014)

NYT By the Book column (2014-12-04).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Pontius Pilate

Ann Wroe · Buy on Amazon

"Pontius Pilate (1999), by Ann Wroe, a masterpiece of analysis and conjecture which I have already read once."

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

Gerard Russell · Buy on Amazon

"Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (2014), by Gerard Russell, a highly topical study of Middle Eastern anomalies which is teaching me a lot, and should be read by all Western policy makers."

Eothen

Alexander Kinglake · Buy on Amazon

"My favorite travel book is Eothen (1844), by Alexander Kinglake, the father of modern English travel writing and a prime exponent of an almost obsolete genre — gentlemanly English humor. So it seems to me still — sparkling, ironic and terrific fun."

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy · Buy on Amazon

"My favorite love story is Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77). In grandeur as in pathos, in the sweep of it as in the touching detail, it moves me now, in my grandly bound edition at my comfortable desk, just as it moved me long ago in smudgy paperback."

Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Judith Schalansky · Buy on Amazon

"So beautifully designed is this little caprice, so meticulous are its maps and so entertaining its matter that I expect to be consulting it as often as I do the Oxford Dictionary."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll · Buy on Amazon

"The two first books I remember reading could not, to my mind, have been better chosen. The first was Lewis Carroll's very English Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). I cherish the memory of them still, and intermittently reread them both."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · Buy on Amazon

"Huckleberry Finn, who came into my life because of my grandfather's passion for Walt Whitman, led me of course into adventure and liberty and the idea of America — an idea which was to play, in the end, a decisive role in determining my life's passage."

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving · Buy on Amazon

"I am repeatedly drawn back to that strange and touching masterpiece, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)."

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes · Buy on Amazon

"I am certainly not joking when I declare Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-15) still the best book ever written on Spain. Wiser critics than me indeed have called it the best book ever written."

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