Nick Hornby's Best-Loved Books's Reading List

"This is Dickens at his funniest and most soulful, and the genius of the minor characters (Micawber, Uriah Heep, Peggoty, Betsey Trotwood) is both a dazzling pleasure and completely intimidating, if you’ve ever had any desire to write fiction."

"Harris’ brilliantly researched study of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1968, following a pivotal year in Hollywood history, is my favorite book about cinema. It’s enormous fun to read but also extremely accomplished: Harris understands the collaborative and random nature of the business better than anyone else I’ve come across."

"A misery memoir, perhaps the first, about the author’s coming-of-age in a strict evangelical Victorian household. Father and Son is perceptive, wise, occasionally comic, and heartbreaking — even if Gosse is now believed by biographers to have stretched the truth a bit."

"A brilliant and important little book — by an Oxford English professor, no less — about taste, high culture, objective artistic worth, and the absurd arguments made to prop the whole teetering edifice up. Carey has an extraordinary mind, and a wicked wit, and it’s hard to read this book and end up feeling the same about what you value and why."

"Random Family follows two young Bronx, N.Y., women as they struggle over a decade with men, kids, drugs, poverty, and, very occasionally, money. It’s an astonishing, and astonishingly patient, piece of reportage; it’s also an important book about contemporary America, and it grips like a thriller."

"Fountain’s achingly sympathetic, funny, and imaginative novel is a book about Iraq and the soldiers fighting there, and it’s set almost entirely within a Texas football stadium. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year."