The book I am currently reading For fun, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m lost in a strange labyrinth and I’m not sure how to get out, or even if I want to. For work, I have Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the go, because I’m writing a novel about Medusa and I am nicking all of it from him. The book that changed my life Euripides’ Medea (which I read before I saw, books being easier to find than stagings of Greek tragedy in Birmingham in the 90s). I have never recovered: I still think it’s the greatest play ever written. I must have seen it 20 times in different productions, languages, settings. Every time I read it I find something new. The book I wish I’d written Ovid’s Heroides. I read these glittering jewel-poems last year during lockdown. They are wonderful. I made a video about one every week for five months, and then translated/adapted “Hypsipyle” for Jermyn St theatre in November, but I would love to do the rest for publication. The book that influenced my writing Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over. I love a polyphonic novel. Try as I might to write a book from a single point of view, I always end up showing events from multiple characters’ perspectives. Plus I always quote the Russian motto he includes at the beginning: “He lies like an eye-witness.” The last book that made me cry Everything makes me cry. I’m a massive weeper. I reread The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper recently, and cried when the rabbits were afraid of Will, right at the start. The last book that made me laugh Calvin and Hobbes, always. The book I couldn’t finish Cervantes’ Don Quixote. And yet, I wrote the programme essay for a stage version of Don Quixote. Also, I once had to talk about Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at Cheltenham literature festival, and I did try to read it, but all I could understand were the smutty Latin bits. So I marked those pages and auctioned off my copy to the audience to distract from the fact that I was taking their money but hadn’t read the book. I gave the cash to a literacy charity, before you write in. The book I’m ashamed not to have read Time is limited and I don’t think it’s worth wasting on a book you’re not enjoying. (I would add, unless I’m being paid to read it. But as you see above, even that isn’t always true.) The book I give as a gift Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. It’s clever and funny. And short, so it doesn’t feel like you’re giving someone homework. I never ask anyone what they think of books when I give them as gifts: reading should be a pleasure and being given a book shouldn’t come with the expectation that you will read it immediately and have views on it. My earliest reading memory Whose Mouse Are You? by Robert Kraus. It’s a story about making yourself belong when you feel isolated. I read it to my niece a couple of weeks ago for the first time. I guess I am her mouse now.