 | Lolita (Penguin Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: £2.97 / Used from: £3.50 I made the mistake of reading Lolita while I was writing my first novel. I was clearly wasting my time. I punished myself the next day by typing I am not Vladimir Nabokov 100 times. With a hammer.
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 | Time's Arrow or the Nature of the Offence by Martin Amis
Buy new: £2.57 / Used from: £2.29 A truly harrowing tale told in reverse. Love affairs start with a slap in the face; yellow cabs pay their passengers up front; and terrified women are abandoned in parks to be cured by rape.
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 | My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir by James Ellroy
Buy used from: £2.13 James Ellroy wove this hard-boiled autobiography around his quest for his mothers killer. Halfway through I began wondering what would have become of Ellroy if he hadnt started writing.
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 | In Cold Blood (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Truman Capote
Buy used from: £5.90 This painstaking reconstruction adds a nauseating sense of inevitability to the massacre of a family and the execution of their killers. You know theyre all going to get it, but you keep hoping.
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 | Lord of the Flies: Great Books Edition (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by William Golding
Buy used from: £4.98 This had to be rammed down my throat three times before I realised it wasnt just some stupid book about some stupid kids on some stupid island. My love of literature began with LotF, not LotR.
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 | Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Buy new: £4.99 / Used from: £0.01 God is nowhere to be found on the pages of this little masterpiece. Tragicomical proof that America is like an eccentric aunt who is fun to have around but fortunately lives elsewhere.
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 | Foucault's Pendulum (Picador Books) by Umberto Eco
Buy used from: £0.01 Dan Browns talent and knowledge of the occult are but a strand of fluff under the toenail of Umberto Eco. Which says more about the latter than the former. Go read, heathens!
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 | Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £0.01 Coetzee refuses to let the reader off the hook. A painfully exhilarating experience. He dissects his characters without anaesthetic. How fresh and new and lovely my own life suddenly seemed.
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 | Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Buy used from: £4.50 I'm a sucker for books about improbably precocious nine-year-olds attempting to unravel the mysterious disappearance of their father. Foer rocks. Gently.
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 | Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot by Richard de Nooy
Buy new: £10.45 / Used from: £9.76 The only book I ever read from cover to cover eight times in a single year. Strangely, it seemed to get better each time. This was a definite must-read for me. Hopefully, others will think the same.
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