Martin Amis's Reading List

"anyone who doubts this has only to glance through Richard Wright's memoir, "Black Boy""

"there is Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and (more obliquely) the earlier masterpiece "Despair.""

"the earlier masterpiece "Despair""

"Anthony Trollope's magnum opus "The Way We Live Now." It's curious: Trollope seemed to specialize in drab and unalluring titles... but "The Way We Live Now" could adorn the cover of any social-realist novel of the last three centuries."

"it combines a novelistic level of perception with a phenomenal journalistic stamina, and I wrote a piece about "Homicide" in a series called "Books I Wish I'd Written.""

"I came late to Herman Melville — late, therefore, to "Moby-Dick" (wantonly dismissed in its day)"

""Billy Budd" will probably stand as the last tragedy in English."

"Unlike many other writers, I started reading very late. For a long time, I only read comics and super-hero stories, then one day, my stepmother [Elizabeth Jane Howard] – who’s also a novelist – insisted that I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. After half an hour, I knocked at her door to know how it finished, I had to know whether Elizabeth Bennet was going to fall for Darcy. That’s how I started reading. I read a lot the year I was at boarding school in Brighton, I think when you’re 1..."

"Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. Flaubert paints a picture of a woman who is vulgar, weak and stupid, but he manages to make her likeable and that’s why we love the novel so much, Flaubert’s unique style makes that possible. I also like Stendhal’s On Love a great deal, even if we lose a lot in translating a text. How can you faithfully translate Flaubert or Kafka? Translating without betraying the original text to some extent, is impossible."

"It contains everything, nothing new has really been written since."