My Book of the Century

The Sea of Fertility, Yukio Mishima; The Magus, John Fowles; Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hoffstadter, The Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake; The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. If compelled to name just one book, it would have to be Mishima's quartet for the stunning beauty and force of his prose. The author uses the reader's mind as his violin, playing a tune almost too intimate to bear, about pain, pleasure and transcendence. But Godel, Escher, Bach expanded my consciousness in so many directions that it felt more like an encyclopaedia than a book, a wonderful and sparkling celebration of human intelligence. And The Magus is perhaps the only book (aside from children's titles) that I have read twice from start to finish. It is plotted as meticulously as a time-sequence puzzle, describing a complex and sophisticated moral universe.