Holiday Reading

Graham Linehan Comedy writer

I'm currently reading Inside Warner Brothers, which is a collection of internal memos from that film company in the years 1935-1951. It's fascinating to see how the old Hollywood system worked, and it almost works as an alternate-world science-fiction novel when you discover that, say, James Cagney nearly played Robin Hood.

I always read for pleasure, but hopefully whatever I'm working on will dovetail with my interests. At the moment I'm working on a theatrical version of The Ladykillers, so I'm reading Donald Thomas's An Underworld at Warto get a feel for the period – or at least the time leading up to the period in which that film was set.

I'm a voracious buyer of books that I never seem to get around to reading. I buy books like I'm going to live to be 1,000 years old in a world with no internet. Yet I have become a terribly slow reader, so I'm always on the lookout for books that will grab me and not let me go. Examples of this kind of book include This Boy's Lifeby Tobias Wolff, Lonesome Doveand the various sequels by Larry McMurtry, and anything by PG Wodehouse.

Sometimes I will read one of those “improving”-type books, and wouldn’t you know it but they’re the ones that sit there, unfinished, mocking me.

As told to Tony Clayton-Lea