George Packer's six favorite books

George Packer's new book is The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Dickens was sui generis, but I keep meeting his outsize, struggling characters in places like Yangon, Myanmar, and Lagos, Nigeria. Societies and literary styles have changed since the 1850s, but there's nothing dated about the moral vision.

Read about the other books on Packer's list.

Bleak House is one of Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Ian Rankin's 5 favorite literary crime novels, Tim Pigott-Smith's six best books, James McCreet's top ten Victorian detective stories and one of Rebecca Ford's favorite five fiction books. It is on John Mortimer's list of the five best books about law and literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature and ten of the best men writing as women, and is among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

Writers Read: George Packer (July 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue