Christmas Reading: Part Two

Mark Till Volunteer, The Reader Organisation 

Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes by Will Self

Perhaps not the most festive choice - "a collection of stories featuring different people suffering from different forms of liver damage" - (especially in light of the approaching Reader Christmas Party...) but Will Self is never dull and always thought-provoking.

Giving:

Collected Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's prose is the most fun you can have on paper. These sixty-five stories ("dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives") span his entire career and are the perfect introduction to the great man's work. Beats socks any day.

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John Scrivener Co-Editor, The Reader

'I like to re-read a Dickens novel around Christmas, and this year it must be Little Dorrit, to remind myself of all the dimensions necessarily missing from the recent TV adaptation. I intend to give (and hope also to receive) Rowan Williams' new book on Dostoyevsky - Williams' imagination is both literary and theological, so I expect this to be good: check out his article on The Devils in The Reader magazine.