Best books… Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker writer picks his favourites. He will give an online talk about his new book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (2 March; riverrun £20), for Jewish Book Week on 27 February (jewishbookweek.com)
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, 1791 (Penguin £25). The best biography ever written in English, and the most entertaining. Addictive as much for Boswell’s presciently modern, informal and racy prose as for Johnson’s epigrammatic precision and enduring (and, it should be said, wholly Christian and conservative) decency.
The Most of A.J. Liebling by A.J. Liebling, 1963 (out of print). The best poetic reporter on Paris, and on boxing, and on war, with the widest range of knowledge and the slyest gift for horizontal allusion. A writer of pleasures – eating and drinking – he is equally good on battles and has a moral point to make that defending pleasure is a good enough reason to resist tyrants.
The Early Stories: 19531975 by John Updike, 2003 (Penguin £20). Miracles of observation, evocation and poignant emotion all hung like stars in a kind of night sky of serenity and delight that was Updike’s alone to discover and then write beneath. Although not a writer of happy subjects – adultery, loss, the pain of time – he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger, 1955 (Penguin £9.99). Out of fashion now, but what other stories manage to be both hilarious in their detailing and profoundly, genuinely religious in their purpose? Still the most soulful comic writer we have ever had, and at the same time the greatest comic writer of the search for soulfulness.
Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1 by Marcel Proust, 1913 (Penguin £12.99). A conventional pick, but the Swann and Odette sections are the most beautiful thing in writing, and when they become the mirroring Marcel and Gilberte childhood sections, they become better than writing.