What would you give? / Features / Untitled Books

"I would send a copy of Remembrance of Things Past to each of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives."

What would you give?

In a twist on the age-old tradition of broadsheets inviting celebrated writers to select their books of the year, we asked a handful of writers which well-known figure they would give a book to this Christmas, what that book would be, and why.

Francis Spufford
(Latest book: Red Plenty, Faber & Faber)
I would give President Sarkozy a copy of Ian Macdonald's The Dervish House. Macdonald, one of Britain's best SF writers, has been working his way through a trio of futures which are definitely not the usual science-fictional suspects, located as they are in India, Brazil and now Turkey. His new book creates the Istanbul of the 2020s so richly, so sensuously that you can breathe the place in; he writes the city with an almost magical-realist pen, though even the strangest things in it aren't inventions, they're discoveries out of real Turkish history and culture. But I want Nicolas Sarkozy to read it because it might help him make the thought-experiment of being at home in Turkey. And that in turn might persuade him that the Turks would make energetic and valuable recruits to the great European collection of Us, instead of being alarming representatives of Them, liable to frighten French voters if we let them into the EU. Turkey's already in the European Union in The Dervish House, and the sky hasn't fallen.

Simon Rich
(Elliot Allagash, Serpent's Tail)
I would send a copy of Remembrance of Things Past to each of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives. Hidden inside each book would be a tracking beacon. Once the ten fugitives were captured, I'd collect the sweet reward money and retire from the literary scene for good. I know what you're thinking: "Won't the fugitives notice the tracking beacons hidden inside their books?" Therein lies the beauty of my plan: people like to collect Proust's books, but no one actually opens them.

Lewis Wolpert
(How We Live and Why We Die, Faber & Faber)
I would like to send Why We Get Sick by R. Nesse and George Williams (Vintage, 1996) to Anne Milton MP - Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health whose portfolio includes medical education. I would want her to ensure that medical schools teach the key concepts in this book which examine the relation between evolution and medicine. New applications of evolutionary biology in medicine are being discovered at an accelerating rate, but few physicians have sufficient educational background to use them fully. Evolutionary biology is an essential foundation for a biological understanding of health and disease.

Natalie Haynes
(The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, Serpents Tail)
I would give a book to Dick Van Dyke, whom I love with my whole heart. It would be the Penguin Classic of Herodotus, in which a boy, Arion, is rescued from drowning by dolphins: Dick Van Dyke was rescued by porpoises in what I can only describe as a copycat incident recently. My news story of the year, without doubt.

Kate Pullinger
(The Mistress of Nothing, Serpent's Tail)
I would give Nick Clegg a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which is about a man who is not the person he appears to be, narrated by another man who longs to be anyone other than who he is.

Niki Segnit
(The Flavour Thesaurus, Bloomsbury)
I very much enjoyed the comedian Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate. It's a memoir which largely takes the form of transcripts of his recent stand-up shows, with footnotes commenting on the gags and the context in which they were written, developed and performed. I imagine, given the form of the book, that Lee is already familiar with the work of David Foster Wallace, late great master of the footnoted riff, but even if he is, he might not have come across Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Like Lee's book it consists primarily of transcripts, in this case of conversations between Wallace and the journalist David Lipsky on a road trip made towards the end of the promotional tour for Infinite Jest. Aside from being a moving reminder of how brilliant Wallace was, even off the cuff, it gives a fascinating insight into the effects of sudden literary fame on a writer who understood as well as anybody how toxic celebrity culture can be.

Nahid Rachlin
(Persian Girls)
The book I would send is The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. It describes the rise of pragmatism in the US after the Civil War among survivors of that war, including Oliver Wendell Holmes who eventually became Chief Justice of the supreme court. Pragmatism is the political and philosophical response to the ideological conflict that gave rise to the war and to the horrors of that war. It would be an appropriate and effective counter to the extreme political and ideological differences that dominate American life today. I would like to send this book to the entire congress, administration and supreme court but I'll settle for the supreme court and, if it has to be one person, to Chief Justice Roberts.

A.D. Miller
(Snowdrops, Atlantic Books)

I think Vladimir Putin needs to read Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy. In the stories he wrote towards the end of his life - even as, in his other work, he was crankily repudiating the art of fiction - Tolstoy seems to have set himself a challenge of concision: to squeeze all of Russia into a series of slender novellas. Hadji Murad, which ranges from the Caucasus to St Petersburg, court to ruined hut, is a miracle of narrative efficiency. It is marked, as you would expect, by the alchemic gift for characterisation that has convinced some of Tolstoy's readers he was touched by divinity. In it, Tolstoy revisits the 19th-century Caucasian War in which he served and which he wrote about, beautifully but excitably, as a young man. While some of the nobility survives in his septuagenarian depiction of fighting, he has come to see that bloodshed yields only more blood and hatred. His tsar, meanwhile, is cruel, capricious, vain and corrupt, though at the same time sure that "there is only one honest man in Russia" - i.e. himself. The tsar's flunkies connive in his delusions to preserve their own perks.
For all those reasons, I would give this book to anyone interested in storytelling and writing. I would give it to Russia's current prime minister in particular because of what it has to say about power and violence. But I'm pretty sure he wouldn't read it.

David Miller
(Today, published in March by Atlantic Books)
Marvellous opportunities can be imagined: to give Bill Oddie a copy of Sam Leith's Dead Pets, or John Lanchester's Whoops! to Gordon Brown, or Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall to Peter Mandelson. But I think I'd present the actress Romola Garai with Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, an extraordinary novel about a young Irish woman's awakening, her gentle coming of age and how her understanding of love and home changes when she moves to America. The book does what any great book should do and makes you look at the world in a different way - quite a splendid achievement. And Garai would be perfect as the heroine in any screen adaptation.

Monday, 20 December, 2010