Who was it who joked: "People say that life's the thing but me, I prefer reading"?

Anyway, I know what he meant. Especially as a child, I preferred reading to any other aspect of living. Now it gets squeezed to the margins. But one day - when I am living alone once more - books will resume their central place in my life.

The best book I've read in the last three years? A question posed in last week's New Statesman. I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but none leaps to mind. The Hours by Michael Cunningham was great but the film was stunning and, thanks to Philip Glass, even better than the book. Now, if I find a book I adore, I tend to buy it for people, and I haven't done that since the eighties (Martin Amis' Money and Jeanette Winterson's The Passion) and the Seventies (Fay Weldon's Female Friends). The best short story I have ever read? Again, an 80's story about the kidnapper Donald Neilson aka the Black Panther. It's the third story in the collection "Lantern Lecture" by Adam Mars-Jones, called Bathpool Park. Unforgettably brilliant.

Favourite "modern" novelist? Elizabeth Taylor. Just deliciously funny and poignant. Favourite Victorian? George Eliot, of course.

Helen
June 2005