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The fabulous cover for Oliver Ready’s stunning translation of Crime and Punishment — restores much of Dostoyevsky’s splendidly macabre sense of humour.

sometimes all you want to do is sit with gabriel garcía márquez’s hundred years… one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century — of any century — and a novel everyone should read at least once.

One of the most disgusting books I’ve ever read — a deliciously sprawling maze of the body and the brain. At times it melts into strange dreams, becoming a surreal crime thriller, before fixating on the horribly real. A triumph of language, fear and loathing.

I hope my forthcoming Mishima book makes a compelling case for each of the 14 novels I devote a chapter to. But I would recommend these 3 to anyone who’s not tried him before. They are breathtaking, exquisite works of art.

I haven’t read The Count of Monte C since I was a teenager. Deliriously excited.

Yōko Ogawa has a naturalness and subtlety that belies the exceptional depth and insight of her writing, especially around memory, loss and the body. If you don’t know her wonderful work, strongly recommend The Memory Police & The Diving Pool: 3 Novellas. Extraordinary writer.

Writing the chapter on Passion According to G. H. for my Lispector book. Perhaps her finest masterpiece, it is a stunning evocation of the chaos that can govern our internal lives — and the greatest novel ever written where the entire plot involves a woman staring at a wardrobe.

Proust’s prose is a habit-forming drug.

It’s been a good year so far for centenaries: Mishima, Boulez, and today, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Simply one of the greatest voices that ever lived — endless intelligence, warmth and versatility.

Borges once wrote, 'What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.' I feel his pain.

fore & aft — a fine time was had by all.

Working on my Lispector book this afternoon on the shores of Loch Ness — I’ve definitely had worse offices. (If you’ve not tried her work, GH is perhaps Clarice’s most astonishing masterpiece: an exquisite existential nightmare.)

Mahler 3 at Inverness Cathedral tonight. Better do some background reading...

Anne Carson’s verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998) fuses modern life with Greek myth and is both a pseudo-study of classical literature and an examination of present-day adolescent sexuality. A great work of originality, wit and often unbearable poignancy.

A hypnotic maze, a hymn to suffering and madness, a love letter to words and time — Pale Fire is one of the great literary experiences, a novel to read and reread over and over again. My Nabokov book argued it is his greatest achievement, a work of endless wonder and enchantment.

Cycling around Loch Ness with Glenn Gould’s first Goldbergs is an intense, exhilarating, slightly precarious, way to spend a Monday lunchtime.

My book on Clarice Lispector’s novels, stories & crônicas argues pretty much everything she touched turned to gold, but here are five favourites for the uninitiated... 5. Água Viva 4. ‘The Fifth Story’ 3. Hour of the Star 2. The Apple in the Dark 1. The Passion According to G.H.

What a remarkable film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi: a hymn to nature, to Japan, to change, to the quiet wonder of everyday life. Not many directors can make you weep at the sight of someone ladling water into a plastic container — but Hamaguchi can. Exquisite, haunting magic.

One of the most profound and humane musical documents I know: Bruno Walter’s recording of Mahler 9 made in Vienna in 1938, just before the Anschluß. It’s tense, scrappy, uneasy, peril and catastrophe looming in every bar. However many Mahler 9s you have, you need this one.

spending some time on/by loch ness with my bike, boat — and jon fosse. what an amazing writer he is. if you don’t know him, septology and melancholy are the haunting major works, but novellas like morning & evening, aliss at the fire and a shining are short eerie masterpieces.