Elle magazine’s Riza Cruz asked award-winning author and book lover Ian McEwan (Atonement, Lessons) to name favorite books in 18 different categories—a bit more fun than the usual Top 10 format. His non-annotated responses are below. For the Full Monty you’ll need to read the Shelf Life books column article . . . on the book that:

Made him miss a train stop: The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)

Made him weep: Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

He would recommend: The Dead (James Joyce)

Shaped his worldview: The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer)

Made him rethink a long-held belief: The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)

He read in one sitting, it was that good: Youth (Joseph Conrad)

Currently sits on his nightstand: We Don’t Know Ourselves (Fintan O’Toole)

He’d pass on to his kid: God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens)

He’d gift to a new graduate: On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

Made him laugh out loud: The Bech Trilogy [The Complete Henry Bech] by John Updike. Bech is Updike’s Nobel Prize-winning, Jewish alter ego, whose literary career rises, nosedives, and rises again. By the end, Bech murders his various hostile critics and is heroically damned by a dying victim.

He’d like to turn into a Netflix show: We Had to Remove This Post (Hanna Bervoets)

He first bought: Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)

He last bought: The Darkroom of Damocles (Willem Frederik Hermans)

Has the best title: What Katy Did (Susan Coolidge)

Has the best opening line: Herzog (Saul Bellow)

Has the greatest ending: Reunion (Fred Uhlman)

Everyone should read: Middlemarch (George Eliot)

Holds the recipe to a favorite dish: Appetite (Nigel Slater)