Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt ...

Do you ever get the urge to read a really long book? To haul “Anna Karenina” to the coffee shop or lug “Gone With the Wind” in your purse for weeks? Occasionally, I do.

I have since read enough to dispute that (Joyce’s Ulysses gets my vote); but literature is not a competition. I quickly realised that Middlemarch is wasted on the young. One has to have lived to ...