I remember recommending three books to people who did not read much but expressed a desire to read more and better books.  The three were, invariably – Life of Pi by Yann Martel, because it was easy to find and sufficiently different to genre fiction to encourage further reading; Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, because it was a solid example of contemporary realism and had a strong and interesting female protagonist (I was always and only asked for book recommendations by women: men do not read); José Saramago’s Blindness, for the adventurous, a book to which I went to great pains to convey would be unlike anything they had previously read, but – stick with it.  Of the three, most often the favourite that came back was Blindness, and to those readers it became very dear.

-19 June 2017

This post is part of the I Remember series.