By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK
It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favourite books. This 
year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).
Louise Harwood is the bestselling author of four novels, all published by Pan Macmillan. Her fifth, Kiss Like You Mean It, will be published by Pan in March next year. She lives in North Oxfordshire, with her husband and two children.
I often seem to read a book five, ten, even twenty years after it was published, it’s an endless catch-up! Last year my favourite book was The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This year I absolutely loved Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (I’m therfore on course to read this year’s Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall in about 2020). But this year my absolute favourite novel was one first published in 1989, that finally reached my bedside a few months ago. It’s Restoration by Rose Tremain. It’s beautifully written, with a proper plot. It’s bawdy and funny, romantic, deeply sad, wonderfully perceptive, historically fascinating, with a central character – Robert Merivel – full of flaws but utterly endearing and I relished every page of it. It’s set in mid-seventeenth century England, and the great events of the century including the plague and the Great Fire of London are woven into the central story, which is the story of Merivel, who first finds himself at the court of Charles II, only to be cast out when he falls for the King’s mistress, there to begin his wonderful journey of self-discovery…
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It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books. This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).
David L. Bosco is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a former
Senior Editor at Foreign Policy and has been a political analyst and journalist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a deputy director of a joint United Nations – NATO project in Sarajevo. His most recent book, Five To Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of The Modern World, tells the inside story of this remarkable diplomatic creation, illuminating the role of the Security Council in the postwar world, and making a compelling case for its enduring importance. Read Bosco’s previous OUPblog posts here.
For those who love history and politics, it’s tough to do much better than Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It helps of course that TR was a compelling, larger-than-life character, but the book is one of the best I’ve read. I particularly remember Morris’s description of TR as police commissioner, skulking around the city trying to catch snoozing cops unaware. The narrative ends as Roosevelt–who was hiking a mountain–learns that McKinley has died and that he will become president. I still go back to the book from time to time just to enjoy the writing.
There are two children’s books that I adored as a kid (and, come to think of it, I need to get them both for our seven-month old son). One is
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Written in the 1930s, it’s a wonderful tale about man and machine struggling together against obsolescence. The other is
One Morning in Maine, by Robert McCloskey. My family used to spend summers in Maine and this one really resonated.
