Book lover: Phil Vine

Phil Vine. Photo / Supplied

Phil Vine is a reporter on TV One's Fair Go.

The book I love most is ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. It sweeps along like a lazy Latin American jungle river with generous, looping bends of narrative that double back on themselves - taking you for miles and yet not - then downstream to an ending that would make a banker cry. Garcia does what all great novelists do, makes you feel good to be a human being. (I also adore everything by Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges.)

The book I'm reading now is ...
My Life as a Fake by the Australian writer Peter Carey. My boss lent it to me. He didn't think much of it but I'm quite enjoying it. It's based on a true story about a mischievous poet who submits some work to a highbrow magazine pretending it was penned by a blue-collar mechanic, now dead. The practical joke backfires and this fictional mechanic morphs into a real character, pursuing the poet to his death.

The book that changed me is ...
Every book I read changes me a little, I guess, but Open Veins of Latin America by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano was quite formative, as was the Guatemalan biography: I, Rigoberta Menchu. On writing itself I would highly recommend The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis. If you can cope with real-life horror then We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch on the Rwandan genocide may change your views on the structural nature of evil, and on the subject of African reportage, you can't go past Poland's only foreign correspondent in the 60s, Ryszard Kapuscinski. His The Shadow of the Sun is a seminal work of old-fashioned journalism.

The book I wish I'd never read is ...
the Bible. When you go cover to cover it loses all of its mystique.