Best books… Mark O’connell

Mark O’connell, a journalist and author based in Dublin, chooses five of his favourite books. He won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize for his debut, To Be a Machine, published by Granta at £9.99

At Swim-two-birds by Flann O’brien, 1939 (Penguin £9.99). This is both one of the funniest books of all time, and one of the most ingenious fictional experiments ever conducted. It’s futile to attempt an account of its plot, but it involves a university student whose effort to write three separate stories gets wildly and hilariously out of hand.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, 1989 (Granta £9.99). This is not just a great work of literary journalism, it’s also one whose greatness resides in it being about journalism; it’s about the writer Joe Mcginniss, the ethical questions around his true-crime book Fatal Vision,

and his relationship with its subject. Malcolm is, I think, one of the greatest prose stylists working in any form, and she is at her best here.

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, 1944 (Penguin £8.99). This collection of short stories is one of the most head-spinning works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. Borges is the kind of writer who changes the way you think about reality, and Fictions is his masterpiece.

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, 1999 (Vintage £11.25). Here Dillard, a deeply religious writer, confronts head-on the depth of depravity and suffering in the world, while holding fast to her faith

with everything she’s got. It’s a work of ecstatic beauty and palpable pain, an unthinkable hybrid of prose poetry, theology, and nature writing. It’s Dillard’s genius in full, dark flow.

Moby-dick by Herman Melville, 1851 (Penguin £5.99). If I had to pick a favourite novel, it would have to be Moby-dick. It is, of course, about a madman who diverts a commercial whaling voyage to hunt down a gigantic whale he has a justifiable grudge against (missing leg, etc.); but it’s also about masculinity, madness, capitalism, religion, colonialism, race, sex, and the unthinkable void at the heart of creation.