Lee Child's Reading List

"And today's answer is: "Live by Night," by Dennis Lehane. I always read for an hour or two in the morning, before I do anything else. And Lehane was in my graduating class, so to speak, in that we came up together, and in some ways he's the best of us."

"Therefore I'd have to pick "The Lost," by Daniel Mendelsohn. Nonfiction, but only incidentally. It's a memoir, a Holocaust story, a detective story, both a rumination on and an analysis of narrative technique… A book of the decade, easily, and likely a book of the century."

"I'm a sucker for long, multigenerational sagas, especially "wronged girl grows up and gets rich and gets revenge" stories, like Barbara Taylor Bradford's "A Woman of Substance.""

"I even enjoyed Jeffrey Archer's "Kane and Abel.""

"I might pick "Gone Tomorrow," which starts well and then continues with the kind of audacity that presses hard against the line without, I hope, ever quite falling over the edge."

"Probably "The Gathering Storm," the first volume in Winston Churchill's World War II memoir, for its sense of helpless spectatorhood as the world stumbled toward utter catastrophe."

"The Famous Five books, by Enid Blyton, would be typical examples."

"I remember very well "The White Rajah," by Nicholas Monsarrat, which had the added advantage of being a good-brother, bad-brother story (I was the bad, obviously), and it had the first real "wow moment" I can remember in terms of plotting."

"I hadn't read "Jane Eyre" either, until she made me, and I'm glad I did, so I'll get to "Emma" eventually."