The Guardian's 'books I've loved' format is a minor art form — its constraint (nine categories, brief answers) forces writers to be more revealing than they intend. Ben Markovits, whose new novel The Rest of Our Lives is published by Faber, is a particularly good subject because his reading autobiography maps directly onto his biography: five children competing for parental attention, a family that moved constantly, a year in Berlin at 17 without friends, and a novelist sister who became a professor of 19th-century literature. The books he loved are almost always books that were good company during periods of isolation. The earliest memory is Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown stories, read in the kitchen with his mother — explicitly described as 'an opportunity to hang out with my mom' in a household of five children where 'attention was hard to come by.' The Lord of the Rings followed, finished in elementary school, already producing the grief of the unrepeatable first read. Both are books about small figures navigating systems larger than themselves, which is also the premise of most of Markovits's favourite novels: 'Most of my favourite novels started with the idea of some lonely figure wandering out into the world to see what the world would do to him.' Dumas's The Three Musketeers fits this template; so, eventually, does Austen. The conversion to Austen is the most analytically interesting moment in the piece. Markovits describes arguing with his sister as a teenager — 'I thought, any book that's so concerned with people falling in love can't be very good' — a position he now regards as evidence that he was a 'dumb kid.' The vehicle for conversion wasn't rereading Pride and Prejudice; it was his sister, who eventually became a professor of 19th-century literature, relaying Austen's own account of her method: 'that famous line about the two inches of ivory on which she produced her effects.' Markovits now says most of his favourite writers work in that tradition — and he's currently reading Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis, another recommendation from his sister, described as 'another writer who works those two inches of ivory.' The sister is the unacknowledged co-author of his literary taste. The Philip Roth section is the most honest about the lag between encounter and appreciation. He read The Human Stain for a book group and didn't like it — 'it sounded too much like the academics I knew from my parents' dinner table, trying to make big statements about America.' Someone later suggested I Married a Communist, and he changed his mind: 'it was just the range of things Roth had thought about, and could speak of with feeling.' This is a useful template for how literary taste actually works — not the first encounter but the right encounter, which is often a different book by the same author. The Hawthorne section makes the same point differently: The Scarlet Letter assigned for a class he was teaching, never having read it, 'turned out to be much longer than I expected, and much, much better. Just a wonderful, tough novel about how to deal with the fact that who you are in the world isn't who you want to be.' That description is good enough to make you want to reread it. The comfort read is PG Wodehouse's The World of Jeeves, described as 'my favourite selection of his stories' — Markovits has been reading it for almost 40 years and has a precise account of how comfort reading works: 'Sometimes I have to leave it alone for a while, because the gum has lost its flavour. It's always a pleasure to come back to it, though.' Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That — read at 17 in Berlin, newly moved school, knowing nobody — gets credit for 'conversational style' and being 'very good company.' Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat was sent to his mother after bad medical news, then played to his children on long car rides during the pandemic, then listened to endlessly by his son. Books recur across generations in this piece — his mother introduced him to Encyclopedia Brown; he sent Three Men in a Boat to his mother; his son discovered it in the pandemic. The reading life is also a family archive.
