Top of the books pile? Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Fourth Estate, 2000). “This book marks the end of a long drought of fiction reading for me,” he says. “I’ve been so swamped reading scientific papers and monographs, along with writing books of my own [Zimmer’s Soul Made Flesh is out on 8 April] that I’ve convinced myself I haven’t had enough time to read a novel. It’s a dangerous, foolish attitude, and I’m glad to be back in the world of fiction.” All-time favourite? Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Penguin, 2003). “It appeared eight years before Darwin’s 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.” Favourite writer? “I’ve long enjoyed James Shreeve’s writing. His latest, The Genome War (Knopf, 2004) – chronicling Craig Venter’s race against government scientists to sequence the human genome – offers him full scope for his penetrating psychological observations of people enmeshed in all the messiness of modern science.”
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