Ed Powles recommends
Books were always important, but they became even more so when I qualified as a lawyer. Work requires all of us to use language in a very dry and precise way. But as a result, it’s sometimes possible to lose sight of how much richer language can be, and what words are really there for.
The way in which something is written often counts for just as much as what it says. Beautiful words can convey ugly ideas – and vice versa.
I’m starting in London.
An Equal Music
Vikram Seth
Haunting. He has the amazing gift of making you think that everything is going to be okay. Even when it probably isn’t.
So much happens, here. Understated and wonderful.
Jean de Florette
Marcel Pagnol
So: you read the book. Then (it’s more or less impossible not to) you read its sequel, Manon des Sources. And then you have to read the two short and beautiful autobiographies which underpin everything you read before.
Humble, enduring stories of injustice, love and revenge in Marcel Pagnol’s beloved Provencal hills.
The films were so good, too.
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
One of the great books about travel. And, like the best of them, it’s about so much more. Although, now I think of it, “so much more” is what travel is really about.
It’s the first part of a journey from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s. Witty, unique, brilliant.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
I hadn’t come across any writing like it. It is amazing. And then – there’s how it ends. It’s set in the Spanish civil war, and it is lovely and tragic.
It’s genuinely a coincidence that the title of this, like the title of my first recommendation, comes straight from John Donne. Everything he wrote is as good as it gets. But that is another story.
Carter Beats the Devil
Glen David Gould
Magic.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
Back to London. A shameless cheat on my part, as there are over sixty stories. But then again, Rupert and Paul beat me to it with On the Black Hill and Any Human Heart, respectively, which otherwise would definitely have been on my list…
I really wish I had read more new books during the course of 2020/2021. But the truth was, despite myself, I found myself coming back to these stories time and time and time again. It's not an original thing to say, but I envy you if you haven’t read these books – you’re going to be able to read them for the very first time.