The book I am currently reading

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s 700 pages long – I’ve been reading it for a while. If a book’s importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we’re in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it’s easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn’t at least familarised themselves with Zuboff’s central ideas. How can we live in the digital age and yet still be so innocent as to what that really means? Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it’s not an anti-tech book. It’s anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It’s really this generation’s Das Kapital. Or should be. The whole argument is that there’s nothing inevitable about the ways in which the technology has been exploited. There could have been another way. There still might be.

The book I wish I’d written

Just a better version of any of my own.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

I think the most honest answer to this is always the children’s books. So in my case, The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl. And all the Anansi stories.

The book I think is most underrated

These things are sadly more about geography than anything else. A lot of extraordinary non-English language books hardly register on our shores. To choose two I read recently: An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans is a classic known to most Dutch readers but new to me. The Barefoot Woman by the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga is a painful, beautiful book that should be more widely read.

The book that changed my mind

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E Fields and Barbara J Fields fundamentally challenged some of my oldest and laziest ideas about race. The books of Emmanuel Carrère and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again.

The last book that made me cry

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout. What’s remarkable about that is that at the time I’d never read the first one, Olive Kitteridge. Strout managed to make me love this strange woman I’d never met, who I knew nothing about. What a terrific writer she is.

The last book that made me laugh

The New Me by Halle Butler and Luster by Raven Leilani, which I read in manuscript when she was a student of mine. They’re both millennial tales of young women, dark in tone and very funny.

The book I couldn’t finish

Too many. I’ve never finished Proust or Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or even The Brothers Karamazov, which I am giving another go at the moment. A Tale of Two Cities. Don Quixote. The list is long. It’s never a question of not liking them – it’s always a question of time and other commitments. I hate not finishing books. I always blame myself.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

It’s hard to single one out of the Tower of Shame but probably Proust. I’m also ashamed not to have read Thomas Thistlewood’s diary all the way through. I was writing about slavery and using it for research, but I found the diary too much to swallow whole. It’s amazing to me that individual humans endured what I could hardly stand to read about.

My earliest reading memory

Avocado Baby by John Burningham made a big impression.

My comfort read

Anything by Chris Ware. It’s comforting to know I have nothing but delight in front of me for a few hours.

The book I give as a gift

I think a book given as a gift should be all pleasure and no obligation, so I often give graphic novels. Recently I’ve given the three volumes of The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf a lot.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

A fool’s hope. Readers decide everything and what they mostly decide is to forget.

• Zadie Smith’s story collection Grand Union is published on 3 October. She will be speaking at the Royal Institution, London (2 October) and Penguin Live, Sheffield (3 October). waterstones.com/events. She will also be part of the inaugural lineup of Australian feminist ideas festival Broadside, held in Melbourne in November, and is speaking in Sydney on November 10.