杏吧原创

Top of the books pile? Michael Chabon鈥檚 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Fourth Estate, 2000). 鈥淭his book marks the end of a long drought of fiction reading for me,鈥� he says. 鈥淚鈥檝e been so swamped reading scientific papers and monographs, along with writing books of my own [Zimmer鈥檚 Soul Made Flesh is out on 8 April] that I鈥檝e convinced myself I haven鈥檛 had enough time to read a novel. It鈥檚 a dangerous, foolish attitude, and I鈥檓 glad to be back in the world of fiction.鈥� All-time favourite? Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Penguin, 2003). 鈥淚t appeared eight years before Darwin鈥檚 Origin of Species, but Melville was already contemplating what it means for us humans to live in a natural world that does not care one way or another for us.鈥� Favourite writer? 鈥淚鈥檝e long enjoyed James Shreeve鈥檚 writing. His latest, The Genome War (Knopf, 2004) 鈥� chronicling Craig Venter鈥檚 race against government scientists to sequence the human genome 鈥� offers him full scope for his penetrating psychological observations of people enmeshed in all the messiness of modern science.鈥�