What I’m reading right now… Ben Lerner’s brilliant 10:04, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. I’ve also just finished Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, both of which blew me away.

My favourite book growing up… I loved science fiction and fantasy, in particular Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle and the other Majipoor books, Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish books, the novels of Alan Garner and Penelope Lively and other, less famous things like Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. But I suspect the books I loved most were The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, both of which I must have read twenty or thirty times. Until quite recently I was too afraid to go back and read them again in case they turned out to be terrible, but I recently reread them again and was surprised and delighted by how singular and thrilling they are.

My all time favourite book is… I read so much it’s difficult to single out any one favourite, but if I had to make a list Anna Karenina, Moby Dick and Middlemarch would all be near the top. I also have a longstanding obsession with Dickens, and I adore Henry James, and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, which I’ve read so many times over the years I’ve lost count. Over the past few years I’ve also been posting lists of my favourite books of the year on my website; you can check out 2013 and 2014 if you’d like a list of some other things I’ve loved recently.

The book I would recommend everyone read…  I’m always wary of pushing books on people I don’t know, but just at the moment I wish everybody would read Callum Roberts’ Ocean of Life, which communicates the scale and urgency of the environmental challenges facing our oceans more articulately than any other book I’ve read in a long while.

The book I wish I wrote… Too many to name!

My guilty reading pleasure is… Superhero comics. Although I’m not particularly guilty about it.

The book on my bookshelf that I have never read… War and Peace. Which is a situation I really must remedy soon …

The book that never should have been turned into a film… I don’t know about books that shouldn’t have been turned into movies – I’m endlessly surprised by the inventive ways filmmakers respond to novels – but the book I’m praying they don’t mess up is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. 

My favourite place is… The beach, either at dawn or dusk.

The most dangerous thing I have ever done is… it wasn’t actually dangerous because I was in a cage, but in 2005 I spent four days cage diving with great whites off South Australia, which was an extraordinary experience. I wrote a piece about the experience, which you can read on my website.