David Mitchell

Author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet suggests:
Here comes a summer without the faintest shadow of a deadline for me, so I'm ushering The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek to the front of the queue. A friend described it as a Catch-22 of WW I, in which Svejk gets Chaplinned in the cogs of the Austro-Hungarian war machine. The novel is meaty — more than 700 pages — but, my friend assures me, it's funny, engaging and excellent company. Best of all, I have no reason to read this book other than "just because I want to."

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