Best books… Philip Hoare

The writer – who has written extensively about whales and made The Hunt for Moby-Dick, a feature-length documentary for the BBC – picks his favourite books. His new book, Albert and the Whale (4th Estate £16.99), is out now

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1851 (Penguin £7.99). A mad and maddening book, less a novel than the result of a 19th century Google search for “whales”. Fearful, violent, funny and sexy, it’s my alternative bible. Dip in anywhere and you will find your thought for the day. Just don’t act it out or you’ll find yourself in the belly of the whale.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, 1924 (Vintage £10.99). In this 20th century riposte to Moby-Dick, the whitened Gothic of Mann’s consumptive sanatorium is stranded high in the snow; it too has black comic set-pieces among all the angst and doom. I love thick books, how their weight shifts from your left hand to your right. As Virginia Woolf said, reading is not a passive act.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf, 1928 (Vintage £7.99). Our gender- and time- travelling hero/ine careers through an alchemical fantasy, all slippery with flash-lit scenes such the Frost Fair on the Thames, looking down to see a porpoise frozen in the river as though caught in a crystal paperweight. (Subtext alert: Virginia’s nickname for Vita, her lover, was “my porpoise”.)

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, 1995 (Vintage £8.99). Like Melville, Sebald is funnier than you might think. His walrus-moustache prose seems lugubrious, but a subtle, ironic humour pervades his wayward stroll through East Anglia, inexorably bound for the crumbling shore of the North Sea.

New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, 2017 (Faber £30). Another great modernist stylist, Moore perched demurely on her Greenwich Village sofa in the 1920s and wrote wildly allegorical poems that had Eliot and Auden green with envy. Only she could turn an octopus into a glacier into a fossil flower, then end up writing the liner notes for Muhammad Ali’s first LP.