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Chimen Abramsky, the grandfather of journalist Sasha Abramsky, was an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. In The House of Twenty Thousand Books, illustrated with the family’s photos, Sasha Abramsky re-creates the lost world of his grandparents, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled their house, from gatherings with Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s Meditations.

Who needs furniture if you can have books?

Periodic cake

People we wish had been our high school chemistry teachers
1. Oliver Sacks
2. Walter White

In 1945 the Science Museum in London reopened (it had been closed for much of the war), and I—a boy of twelve with a passion for metals and numbers—first saw the giant periodic table displayed there. The table itself, covering a whole wall at the head of the stairs, was a cabinet made of dark wood with ninety-odd cubicles, each inscribed with the name, the atomic weight, and the chemical symbol of its element. And in each cubicle was a sample of the element itself (all of those elements, at least, that had been obtained in pure form, and that could be exhibited safely). It was labeled “The Periodic Classification of the Elements—after Mendeleeff.”

My first vision was of metals, dozens of them in every possible form: rods, lumps, cubes, wire, foil, discs, crystals. Most were gray or silver, some had hints of blue or rose. A few had burnished surfaces that shone a faint yellow, and then there were the rich colors of copper and gold.

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On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Ian McEwan’s first book First Love, Last Rites, the author recalls how he wrote that “scandalous” collection of stories featuring incest, sexual abuse, murder, and a penis in a jar.

Other strange voices, other weird or wretched characters, surfaced in that year to haunt or infest my fiction. Violent, sexually perverse, lonely, they were remote from the life I was living in Norwich at the time. I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious. Sometimes I persuaded myself I was some kind of wild man, a fauviste, kicking against the bourgeois divorce novel that people complained about.

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Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Detail of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1510–1511

Walter B., an affable, outgoing man of forty-nine, came to see me in 2006. As a teenager, following a head injury, he had developed epileptic seizures—these first took the form of attacks of déjà vu that might occur dozens of times a day. Sometimes he would hear music that no one else could hear. He had no idea what was happening to him and, fearing ridicule or worse, kept his strange experiences to himself.

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Reusable shopping bag at Powerbooks, Php25. We’re sure we said that somewhere, we just don’t know where.

It’s a reading advocacy project, we don’t get royalties from sales. Not only is the bag useful, but the color is so bright it’s practically a light source.

L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific science-fiction writer of the 1940s and 50s who wanted more than the dollar per word he was paid for his pulp novels. It occurred to him that the fastest way to gain fame, fortune and power was to start his own religion. This was well within the skill set of a man who’d published over a thousand novels about space aliens with superpowers (Anyone see Battlefield: Earth?). Hubbard wrote a book called Dianetics, which became the founding text of Scientology.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is the fascinating HBO documentary about the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard. Writer-director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) looks into the personal history of the founding father, who styled himself “Commodore” because he had served in the navy during World War II (and was relieved of his command when he mistakenly shelled Mexico). Gibney traces the rise of the cult, talks to high-profile apostates such as filmmaker Paul Haggis (Crash) and high-ranking ex-members of the cult, and also answers the question, “Why did Tom Cruise suddenly divorce Nicole Kidman?” One of the documentary’s producers is Lawrence Wright, author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief. Wright mentions his fascination with religion, why people choose to believe what they believe, and their crushing certainty that eliminates all doubt.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.