My Literary Top 10: Alasdair Gray |
|  | 1 | Best short stories I’ve ever read Hans Anderson, Edgar Allan Poe, Chekhov. | | 2 | Book that should be on the national curriculum The Border Ballads by Anon. And here’s one I had to read which no child should have to study: Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. | | 3 | Book I’d blush to be seen reading on the tube I never blush on the tube. | | 4 | Best ‘film of the book’ I've seen The Europeans (Merchant Ivory) by Henry James. | | 5 | Most overlooked literary hero Anon. | | 6 | Most overlooked form of writing The nowadays neglected category of Essayists — which includes the best writings of Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Coleridge, MacAulay, Ruskin, Arnold and even some 20th Century writers. | | 7 | Books, writers and people that first engaged my interest in writing Hans Anderson’s Tales, Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God, A.A.Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, Carroll’s Alice novels, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, everything by H.G.Wells, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, Kafka, and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. | | 8 | My favourite bookshop Voltaire and Rousseau, Otago Street, Glasgow. | | 9 | Author I'd like to nominate for the Nobel Prize for Literature James Hogg. | | 10 | Deceased author I'd most like to converse with… Herman Melville: a great writer who knew his own greatness and knew it had condemned him to be, in the eyes of his contemporaries, an obscure failure. It would have amused him that nowadays many think him GREAT. What a lot he could have told me! |
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