A friend recently told me she had read about a dozen books during an illness and wondered how many books she could have read if she hadn’t partied so much all her life. I have read many books and I often wonder how much I could have lived if I hadn’t read so much.

The Hours is a book about happiness, the happiness that resides in the simple things which we only become aware of long after the moment itself has passed.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. The sentences seem to flow over the pages, at once 'heftig bewegt', then 'utterly tranquil' or 'quietly flowing' as Anton Webern annotated his Five Movements for String Quartet.

Life A User's Manual is a book for readers, and the more you have read the more you will appreciate the subtle references to other novels and popular culture. But to say so would do injustice to a book that is quite simply a marvel to read.

I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my mother gave me a big encyclopaedia of Greek mythology. I absolutely loved it. I bought The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the year the Dutch translation was published, in 1991. I was hooked from the first page. This was the book I’d been waiting for.

Virginia Woolf renunciated the 19th century novel and the idea that life tells a narrative, that it unfolds as a tragedy, a comedy, a detective or some other style figure. A story creates a unity that doesn't exist, or at least not necessarily, thereby distorting reality.