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According to an interview with Oprah, Rowling's favorite book is Emma. She has claimed that she'll never be able to write a twist ending quite as good as Emma's, and says: "You're drawn into the story, and you come out the other end, and you know you've seen something great in action. But you can't see the pyrotechnics; there's nothing flashy."

The collected works of French author Colette is one of three books she’d take to a desert island (along with the collected works of Shakespeare and PG Wodehouse). Chéri, the tale of a woman and her self-centered young lover, is her particular favorite. “I could never write the way Colette did,” Rowling says. “I’ve never found anything to match her descriptive passages, ever.” She also recommends Secrets of the Flesh, a biography of Colette by Judith Thurman.

Rowling has often talked about The Little White Horse being her favorite childhood book, saying that it was “the only [book] whose influence I was conscious of.”

“She’s the children’s writer with whom I most identify,” Rowling says of E. Nesbitt. Rowling calls The Story of the Treasure Seekers a “breakthrough children’s book” because it wasn’t a morality tale like the other children’s books of the time.

Rowling says this book holds the most importance for her, and she frequently talks about it in the same breath as Jane Austen, seeing them both as being “profoundly moving without ever becoming mawkish.”

Rowling is a big fan of Little Women, saying that her “favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.”

In 2012, Rowling described Team of Rivals as the last truly great book she read. “I lived in it the way that you do with truly great books,” she says, adding, “putting it down with glazed eyes and feeling disconcerted to find yourself in the 21st century.”

Rowling loves this book enough to have provided a quote for its recent edition: “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I ever met.”

Rowling credits Macbeth as the inspiration for Harry Potter. However, when asked by the Royal Society of Literature to name the top 10 books for schoolchildren, it was Hamlet, not Macbeth, that Rowling included on her list.

Although Rowling has never named a favorite Wodehouse book, she has mentioned him numerous times as one of her most admired writers. Wodehouse is one of the UK’s best-loved comical writers, and you can see elements of his humor in Harry Potter. She was tempted to make him the one author, living or dead, who she’d like to meet, but decided that he’d be too shy. “I’ve got a feeling we’d just discuss laptops rather than exploring the secrets of his genius,” she says.