Ben Markovits: ‘I used to think that any book concerned with people falling in love couldn’t be very good’ | books

My first memory is reading
I was reading Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American children’s series about a boy detective and his adorable friend Sally, who protects him as they face off against their nemesis, Bugs Minnie, a sort of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We would sit in the kitchen together and try to solve crimes. Of course, for me it was also an opportunity to spend time with my mother. I am one of five children. It was hard to get attention. But I was also drawn to Sobol’s picture of small-town American life, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt a part of. We moved a lot.

My favorite book growing up
I remember finishing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in elementary school and actually feeling sad that I wouldn’t be able to read it again for the first time. I have a faint memory of being at school, because the feeling has something of the flavor of the school hallway, the bright lights on the shiny tiled floors, and the general feeling of being isolated for the rest of the day. Some of my older brother’s friends had already introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which shaped the next few years of my life. Most of my favorite novels begin with the idea of ​​a lonely person wandering the world to see what the world will do to him. (Later, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers was another favourite.)

The book that changed me as a teenager
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves. I was 17 and my parents had just moved us to Berlin for a year. Part of the appeal was that Graves had a German background as well, but I think I was also responding to the conversational style. As a book, it was very good company. I had just moved to school and didn’t know anyone.

The writer who changed my mind
When I was a stupid kid I used to argue with my older sister about Jane Austen. I think I just read Pride and Prejudice in school. I thought any book that cared too much about people falling in love couldn’t be very good. Later, my sister became a professor of nineteenth-century literature. From her I first heard Austen’s account of her virtues as a writer, that famous line about the two inches of ivory on which she produced her influences. Most of my favorite writers now work in this tradition.

The book or author you returned to
My wife and I were part of a book group briefly in our twenties; I don’t think any of us read books often. But someone picked up Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and for whatever reason, I got through it — even though I didn’t like it. It sounded like the academics I knew at my parents’ dinner table, trying to make big statements about America. Later someone suggested that I had married a communist, and I changed my mind – it was just a bunch of things Roth had thought about, and could talk about with feeling.

The book I re-read
Jerome K. Jerome Three men in a boat. In my twenties, I sent it to my mother to cheer her up after she had just received some bad medical news. Years later, during the pandemic, my son listened to the audiobook endlessly — I think we played it for the first time for kids on long car trips.

The book I discovered later in life
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. For some reason, I never read it in high school, which is where most American kids usually ruin it. Then, about 10 years ago, I assigned it to a class without having read it in novels. It turned out to be much longer than I expected, and much better. Just a wonderful, challenging novel about how to deal with the fact that who you are in the world is not who you want to be.

The book I’m currently reading
Phyllis’s Cousin, by Elizabeth Gaskell. Another recommendation from my sister, and another writer who works in those two inches of ivory.

Read my palm
Jeeves’ World, by P. G. Wodehouse, is my favorite choice of his stories. I’ve been reading it now for almost 40 years. Sometimes I have to leave it for a while, because the gum has lost its flavour. It’s always a pleasure to come back to.