How I Pick What to Read Next

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

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2666, Andre forget, Martin Amis, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Nila Bhowmick, Roberto Bolaño, Tathagata Bhattacharya

In a world of algorithms and Goodreads, how does a person pick what to read next? Since creating my own website in 2011 to write things I’ve also used it to track what books I’ve read. But the following describes what tends to guide me in what to read next.

I’ve had two editors named “T” who got me onto excellent books. The first, Tathagata Bhattacharya, is a novelist himself who comes from a distinguished line of writers. His father is the great Bengali radical novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya, and his grandmother is Mahasweta Devi, a legendary writer and activist famous across India and beyond. T got me onto Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and also Yeshar Kemal’s novels, The Wind from the Plain, Memed, My Hawk, and They Burn the Thistles. It’s easy to read T’s novel, General Firebrand and His Red Atlas, and feel his love for both Vasily Grossman and his father’s works.

T’s wife is also a dear friend of mine, Nila Bhowmick, and her non-fiction books–How Not To Be a Superwoman and Lies Our Mother Told Us: The Indian Woman’s Burden–are brilliant. I’m excited to read her upcoming novel.

My second editor T, Tyler, got me into Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. I’ll forever be indebted to him for this. Today we have a book club featuring just that book, ie we talk about 2666 whenever we hang out. He also loves Martin Amis’ Times Arrow, which absolutely floored me, and Hemingway. Maybe because of him I read The Sun Also Rises. Some Morley Callaghan stories, too. He got me into Point Omega by DeLillo.

Another friend and ex colleague, André Forget, an excellent novelist in his own right too, also guided me to me several excellent novelists. JK Huysmans, Goncharov, and Gaddis. His love for Orhan Pamuk pushed me to read The Black Book, an excellent novel. Against Nature, Oblomov, and The Recognitions are all masterpieces. I had read Pamuk earlier, The Snow, and quite liked it.

I have a recollection of Tathagata praising Kemal far above Pamuk, but I spoke to him more recently and he quite loves them both. I associate my two friends with each of these legendary Turkish authors.

Andre’s novel In The City of Pigs was truly excellent. It floored me! Not just because it was set in Toronto and felt familiar in theme and content. He’s friends with some outstanding contemporary novelists I doubt I would have otherwise found: Noor Naga, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Fawn Parker’s Hi, It’s Me and What We Both Know, and Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero Of Our Time, and his body-horror novella, Helpmeet. Naga, Parker, and Forget were all longlisted for the Giller, while Ruthnum was outrageously snubbed.

I’ve often thought, “surely there must be outstanding contemporary novelists, I wonder who they are!” and I’m obliged to Andre for helping to answer this. I’m very confident in recommending any of these writers to anybody. Andre also edited After Realism, a great, gutsy collection of contemporary literature.

My darling Amanda directed me to The Shadow of the Wind, A Night To Remember, and many other cool non-fiction books. Friends in India put me onto Ambedkar and essayists like Khushwant Singh. Doug Miller at Miller Books got me reading Lethem and Auster, two very cool, impressive writers.

Sometimes I consult my favourite dead novelists by reading what they love. My love for Bolaño has got me to read more Bolaño than 2666 or Savage Detectives, but also his favourite works, like Don Quixote and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. Next I plan to read another dear love of his, Nicanor Parra.

I’ve also read some Pablo Neruda because Bolaño doesn’t like him and I wanted to see why, for my own curiousity and to better understand By Night in Chile. The truth is, the Neruda I read I really loved. Sorry, Roberto! I’m sure I’ll learn more about your distaste for Neruda’s poetry and politics and come to see your point of view, but meantime, I found the language sadly very dazzling and beautiful. I wanted to dislike him, but it turns out the poet many said was the 20^th century’s best is in my opinion very good.

Years ago I met a contemporary writer, Daniel Perry, through a mutual friend, and his work is excellent. I loved his short story collections, Hamburger and Nobody Looks That Young Here, and his recent novella Modern Folklore is outstanding. Along the same lines, Sofi Papamarko’s short stories Radium Girl was great.

Sometimes friends who aren’t novelists or my editor recommend books to me and I’ve been led to excellent works that way. That’s how I found Cloud Atlas and A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Of course, there’s always Vladimir Nabokov as guide. His literary lectures on Russian and European authors is an incredible way to find great novels and have an absolute genius by your side as a literary companion. I read Dickens’ Bleak House, Proust, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, and of course my dearly beloved Nikolai Gogol this way. Reading literary criticism about a difficult text can be a wonderful motivator to read it. For years I’ve had Nabokov’s lectures on Don Quixote on my shelf, and finally got to read that because of Bolaño .

My dad really loved JM Coetzee, Disgrace, and so did I. He loves Maugham and maybe I’ll read that soon. I told myself I would.

So long as you love what you read, there’s probably no bad way to get recommended books. I’ll just say that sometimes you don’t know what you need next, and trusting an algorithm to reverse-engineer a list for you based on what you’ve read already may be looking backwards instead of forwards. It may very well direct you to books you enjoy, but there’s a type of book it won’t put in your hands, and that’s the kind of book I’ve been chasing. Sometimes I wonder if satisfaction comes in higher tiers we don’t know about yet, and can’t dream up until we do. Then again, YouTube directed me years ago to Alice Coltrane.

Sometimes, knowing a book has delighted someone I know and trust helps me read it, in the way a joke is genuinely funnier when you hear a friend laugh at it. Friends and writers I admire have no commercial ulterior motive and I know they’re suggeseting a book because it means something to them, even if I don’t end up loving it. In a way, reading a friend’s favourite is like holding a three-way conversation. I wonder if American literature has an outsized impression on me, but even so, maybe I’ll read Gass, Vollman and John Williams soon. Maybe Clarice Lispector. I mostly use Twitter now to connect with like-minded readers and music fans, and these writers are popular there. Technology can be a useful tool if used correctly. It all comes down to people in the end.

Jeffrey’s Version—My literary and literal journey with Richler’s beloved novel

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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Barney's Version, Jeff Halperin, Mordecai Richler, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Noah Richler

One day I stumbled on Barney’s Version at a book sale at my local bank for $1, and because I had heard the name Mordecai Richler before I thought, sure. It was 2008 or so. I had just finished doing a literature degree at Dal and thought I knew something about books.

But this one was just so funny, so honest, and seemed in all conceivable senses to be designed for me personally. This is not the place to analyze the novel or discuss anything inside it. I just want to tell a story that has a middle and ending that you won’t see coming, because I certainly didn’t!

Barney’s Version made me want to become a writer. So I started writing, and soon went on to read all Richler’s other books (except, on the written advice of Mordecai himself, his first three novels). Currently on my shelf are 27 Mordy books.

I read his non-fiction, secondary criticisms, the wonderful Foran bio, and even found for $2 a signed hardcover copy of Don’t Stick Your Neck Out. The Incomparable Atuk was released in the US under this alternate title. What I’m saying is, I got big into him!

In 2014 I was writing arts stuff for a TO website with a small but noble readership when I learned Noah Richler was curating the Luminato literary fest. I emailed him some questions, and we went back and forth a bit.

We met at the event, and soon after he graciously and very surprisingly invited me to “his local” to chat more over beer. I was excited! Noah has worked for decades as a journalist around the world, and is a great writer in his own right.

We talked about literature. He asked if I had ever read any of his father’s work, and I responded, “yes.” He asked me if I write fiction and I said “yes” again. He asked what my novel was called, I said it didn’t have a name yet. He asked what it was about. “Love and advertising.” He said that would make a perfect title, and he was right, so I called it that. (This novel is currently unpublished.)

Anyway, in about a year’s time I moved to New Delhi to help launch an international news station, World Is One News. I worked on the web desk, and my editor at WION has since become a dear, dear friend of mine. Tathagata Bhattacharya has reported from four continents, and has an astounding depth of knowledg on topics ranging from dog breeds, world history, military armaments, finance, to Dead/Band/Dylan. He also knows literature in his bones.

His grandmother, who died in 2016, was Mahasweta Devi, one of India’s most revered authors and social activists, and I understand was a runner up for the Noble Prize in literature, having published over 80 works. T’s father, who died in 2014, was Nabarun Bhattacharya, a radical Bengali novelist who transformed that language’s literature.

T leant me a copy of Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, inscribed by his father Nabarun. “Dear Bao, For a Brave Life & a Bravely Faced Fate.” I loved that novel, and it was good to get my head out of news for a bit and back into literature.

After a visit home to Toronto, I gifted to him an inscribed copy of Barney’s Version. He read and really liked it, saying it was funny and so readable, but its weave and structure was deceptively complex. Precisely.

Anyway, witnessing Tathagata proudly handle his father and grandmother’s legacy–ie corresponding with publishers, fans, news agencies, posting pictures and anecdotes on Facebook–inspired me to contact Noah again. Why not just be straight up and share a story he’d probably like, rather than be self conscious and do nothing?

I emailed Noah, reminded him who I was, and told him that I didn’t want to be a Fan Boy back when we met, but actually I had read all his father’s books. I told him that BV is what made me want to write, and how I gifted BV to Tathagata and he enjoyed it, and I explained who Tathagata was and that seeing him honour Mahasweta and Nabarun’s works is what made me want to reach out to him. I also sent him a picture of a copy of Barney’s Version sold in India, with a cover I had never seen before.

I got back a very long and warm email! And to my total amazement, actually, Noah had interviewed Mahasweta Devi for the BBC. Jewish Montreal, Toronto, Calcutta, London — small little world! Noah’s email was extremely gracious and friendly. In it he politely asked if I could do a favour and buy and ship to him a copy of Barney’s Version with the cover he had never seen before either for his mother’s archive (the Florence, ie Mordecai’s wife, the model of Miriam in BV no doubt). He’d reimburse me, of course.

Back in Toronto we met and had a very nice talk. After our initial meeting but before I had gone to India, he had been a high-profile federal candidate for the NDP, and had written a fun, candid and very well received book about the experience, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

I gave him the copy of Barney’s Version with the Indian cover, and of course refused his money—I was very honoured and frankly tickled to contribute my favourite novel to Florence Richler’s own archive.

Over the years I’ve bought probably 10-15 copies of that novel for people. I left 3 or 4 in India. In addition to my reading copy I have the Uncorrected Proofs too, still with the handwritten notes from the reviewer and a letter from Knopf Canada outlining/boosting the novel, and advertising Mordecai’s availability for interviews.

I’m only telling this story because the other day on Twitter I saw someone with the handle “Barney Panofsky’s Best Intentions,” and told him that I followed him solely on the basis of his most excellent name. I couldn’t tweet this story to him, too long, so I wrote this. Why didn’t I tell this story earlier? Maybe I’m uncomfortable name-dropping and it’s impossible to tell this story without doing that. But really, who gives a shit.

I’m happy to celebrate Mordecai! My darling Mordecai! I say that while there are “Greater” novels, BV remains my comfort food, my bagel lox and cream cheese, and my death-bed meal.

And actually a documentary came out literally just two days ago entitled “Nabarun,” about the literature of Nabarun Bhattacharya. I had heard so much about him from T, and praise for his writing from other Bengalis, but until watching this documentary I had never seen him on video or heard him speak, either in Bengali or in English. The raw footage of him was excellent, and very inspiring even! Plus my dear bud Tathagata is in the documentary too, and I haven’t seen him since 2017. Pranati Bhattacharya, Nabarun’s wife and T’s mom, is also in it, a force to be reckoned with who I met briefly shortly before she died.

Looking back, that $1 I spent for my original copy of Barney’s Version was my best investment ever…I wish I could stretch every buck this far!