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| Jo Nesbø |
The
Books
0f my
life
Jo Nesbø: ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’
The Norwegian crime writer talks about his early influences, changing tastes and the age-limit for enjoying Hemingway
My favourite book growing up
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. My father grew up in New York; I guess that’s why there were a lot of American books in our house. These two by Mark Twain were food for the imagination for a kid like me. The Huck book was my first road novel, Tom Sawyer my first murder mystery.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s classic novel about life and exploitation as a gay man living on the margins in 1930s Europe, changed my view on what literature can and should deal with. At that age, I found it tough reading because the mental landscape of the main character was repellent to me. Not his sexual orientation, but because he found some kind of pleasure in being treated badly. I couldn’t grasp that. And that was probably what drew me to the novel.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Both On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye were important. I do think writing is a result of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music. That it’s mainly a social reflex, like stories being told around a dinner table; somebody has contributed a story, now it’s your turn.
The book I could never read again
I was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I started rereading (which I very seldom do) a novel of his, and realised it felt dated. I don’t know if it’s because Hemingway, like Raymond Chandler, has influenced so many writers that they now can come across as almost comic copies. When I mentioned my disappointment, my 25-years-younger editor said, with a world-weary sigh: “But, you know, Hemingway is a young man’s writer.”
The book I discovered later in life
Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. I was recently going through the books I’ve inherited from my parents. It follows three generations of a family, with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a backdrop, and it’s a gem of a novel. It has this sense of time and place that I know is impossible to construct – it has to already be there within the writer. It’s sad, it’s epic and it has a tragic gravity to it that brings a lump to my throat: the fact that you can’t go back, that the past – not the future – is the promised garden.
The author I came back to
Well, Henrik Ibsen was mandatory reading when you went to school in Norway, and at that young age he felt old and boring. It was only later, when I was living a life where I could relate, that I started reading him. I went on to read all of his plays, every one of them, and realised what a great entertainer he is.
The book I am currently reading
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a background in social anthropology and psychology and it’s a convincing argument on how morality has evolved and on how it divides us in politics and social behaviour, enlightening when it comes to understanding why some Americans vote Republican in spite of being decent, intelligent human beings. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of emotions. We use our intellect to find confirmation that what we feel and want to be true is actually the truth. Confirmation bias may carry us from our childhood to our grave, without ever feeling we were proved wrong. That goes for “them” and for me and you, Guardian readers.
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THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE
2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’
Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’
Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’
2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’
Nikesh Shula /
Olivia Laing /
Viet Thanh Nguyen /
Madeline Miller /
Barbara Trapido /
Monica Ali /
Sebastian Barry /
Hanif Kureishi /
Neil Gaiman /
Lee Child /
PAGE 7
Meg Mason /
Esther Freud /
Maggie Shipstead /
Ian Rankin /
Julian Barnes /
Sadie Jones /
Tahmima Anam /
Tess Gerritsen /
Abdulrazah Gurnak /
Susie Boyt /
Sara Paretsky /
Sebastian Faulks /
Karen Joy Fowler /
Eimear McBride /
Sam Byers /
Denise Mina /
Adam Kay /
Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’
Kit de Waal /
Sunjeev Sahota /
PAGE 6
Shehan Karunatilaka /
Michael Morpurgo /
Michelle Zauner /
Amy Blum /
Philip Pullman /
2023
Alex Wheatle /
Colin Thubron /
Audrey Maggee /
Joseph O'Connor /
Ned Beauman /
Kevin Jared Hosein /
Carlo Roveli /
Benjamin Myers /
Charlotte Mendelson /
Warsan Shire /
Katherine Rundel /
Louise Kennedy /
Colson Whitehead /
Han Kang /
Dreda Say Mitchell /
PAGE 5
Jessie Burton /
Kamila Shamsie /
Jenny Erpenbeck /
Gary Shteyngart
Attica Locke /
Richard Ford / ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’
Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’
Paul Lynch /
John Niven /
PAGE 4
Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’
Dolly Alderton /
Jonathan Escoffery /
Joanne Harris /
Hernan Diaz /
Irenosen Okojie /
Bob Mortimer /
Francis Spufford /
2024
Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”
2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’
