Book lover: Fergus Barrowman

Fergus Barrowman is the publisher at Victoria University Press.

The book I love most is ... A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, a dazzlingly inventive speculative novel about culture and technology, which is also compelling on a human level. But I'm fickle. That's just the last novel I fell hard for, in a line that goes back through Gifted, The Savage Detectives, Home, all the way to The Magic Faraway Tree.

The book I'm reading right now is ... I'm alternating chapters of The Memory Chalet, a memoir by the historian Tony Judt, and Listen To This, essays by the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross on subjects ranging from Brahms to Bjork and the history of the walking bassline.

The book I'd like to read next is ... Terry Teachout's biography of Duke Ellington but, unfortunately, he's only up to chapter three. His Louis Armstrong biography, Pops, was one of the best things I read last year.

The book that changed me is ... After Z-Hour, by Elizabeth Knox. The Vintner's Luck is her most famous book, but it was over the manuscript of her first novel that we first met 25 years ago.

The book I wish I'd never read is ... Atomised, by Michel Houellebecq. Usually, if I persevere with a bad book it's because it's teaching me something, but that one just left me ashamed.