By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  Yes.

  Wait, do you think those things are exclusive? That books can only be one or the other? I would rather read a book with all of those things in it: a laughing, crying, educating, distracting book. And I would like more than that, the kind of book where the pages groan under the weight of keeping all such opposites apart.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  No. Perhaps because there have been few books in recent years I actually broke up with, realizing we were not right for each other. There are instead books I have stopped seeing, and vaguely intend to finish one day, the next time I run into them, but they are vaguer, more general things.

  I remember the first book I didn’t finish, though. It was Mistress of Mistresses, by E. R. Eddison. I was around seventeen, and I’d finished every book I’d started before then. It was inconceivable to me not to. I’d read and mostly enjoyed Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, a fantasy epic written in a lush, thick, cod-Elizabethan style that started off irritating and then became part of the fun. I bought Mistress of Mistresses and abandoned it a third of the way through. It was gloriously liberating, the idea that I didn’t have to finish every book.

  But mostly, I did. If I started it, I’d read it to the end: until I found myself a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the UK, and obliged to read every science-fiction book published in the UK in the year of eligibility. I was a judge for two years. The first year, I read everything. The second year, I read a lot of first chapters and took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter.

  Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?

  As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

  He was a sui generis writer, the oddest and most frustratingly delightful of American tall-tale tellers. Not a lot of people have read him, and even fewer like what he wrote, but those of us who like him like him all the way. We never met.

  The last time I wrote to Lafferty, he had Alzheimer’s and was in a home in Oklahoma, shortly before his death, and I do not believe he read or understood the letter, but it made me feel like I was doing something right by writing it and sending it.

  What’s the best comic book you’ve ever read? Graphic novel?

  Ow. That’s hard. I think I love Eddie Campbell’s ALEC: The Years Have Pants best of everything, but it’s a hard call.

  Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell is pretty wonderful, after all. Watchmen had a bigger influence on me than anything else, reading and rereading it a comic at a time as it was published, as did the High Society and Church and State sequences of Dave Sim’s Cerebus.

  And Will Eisner’s The Spirit is funny and sad, educational and entertaining (read the books, ignore the movie).

  I’m about to start building giant lists of comics and graphic novels here, so I will stop. (Quick! Read anything by Lynda Barry!)

  There. I stopped.

  What do you plan to read next?

  The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. I have so many proof copies of the book, given to me by people certain that if I read it I would love it, that I feel guilty. They stare at me from all over the house. I resisted when Audrey Niffenegger told me I had to read it, but when my daughter Holly told me how much she loved it, I knew I would have to succumb.

  Neil Gaiman is the author of Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Odd and the Frost Giants, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, among other books.

  * * *

  The Gift of a Book

  When I was nine, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was ten. My mother got them from a mail-order catalog. We weren’t a household that owned many books so it was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That’s just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That’s when I became enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too, as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine, Jane Eyre without the embarrassing bits.)

  —Hilary Mantel

  Gender Outlaw, by Kate Bornstein. I got it for my birthday last year from my daughter after a family discussion on the merits of transgender surgery. It’s a fascinating and illuminating memoir by a transgender playwright.

  —Caroline Kennedy

  A copy of Libra, with a nice inscription, that Don DeLillo sent me in 1989. I must have asked my publisher to send him a finished copy of my first novel; there’s no way to explain the gift otherwise. But after spending my twenties working in near-total isolation and revering DeLillo from afar, I couldn’t believe that I had something signed to me in his own human hand. At some level, I still can’t believe it.

  —Jonathan Franzen

  I’m not currently teaching, but it’s a wonderful feeling when a former student gets a book published and sends me a copy. This happened last year with a woman named Bianca Zander, whose terrific first novel is called The Girl Below. It’s about a young woman who returns to London after a decade in New Zealand and confronts strange events from her past

  —Curtis Sittenfeld

  Peter the Great, by Robert Massie. It kicked off my obsession with Russian history.

  —Jeannette Walls

  Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago—a book that in many ways changed my life. Almost twenty years ago, I was halfway through writing my first novel, Digital Fortress, when I was given a copy of Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman. His book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. Two months ago, by chance, I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me write Digital Fortress. He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write The Da Vinci Code.

  —Dan Brown

  On December 7, 1999, I left the bedside of my editor Faith Sale, just before she was removed from life support. We had been like sisters. Two hours later, Stephen King called and asked my husband, Lou, and me to meet him at his hotel room. It was his first public foray after being nearly killed by a van six months before. He gave me an advance reading copy of On Writing. A couple of years before, we had talked about the question no one asks us in interviews: language. He had been thinking of doing a book on writing, and I had said, “Do it.” He now asked me to look at the dedication. It was for me. We then went to see the premiere of The Green Mile, about a man on death row who can heal people, including those dying of cancer. That night was both enormously sad and gloriously uplifting.

  —Amy Tan

  * * *

  Mary Higgins Clark

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Reader’s Journey Through the Christian Classics, by Raymond A. Schroth.

  When and where do you like to read?

  I like to read anywhere. I never go to a doctor or dentist without a book in my bag. At home I used to love to read in bed but fall asleep too easily. So my favorite spot is a roomy wing chair with a footstool in the family room. If I’m working on my own book, I’ll be reading background material in my third-floor office at home in Saddle River.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  After many years, I just reread Pride and Prejudice and understand why it is, and always will be, a classic.

&
nbsp; Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  Fiction or nonfiction: honestly, both. I love to read historical biographies, and of course I cut my teeth on suspense, starting with The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May, in which an infant is left on the doorstep. The babysitter had been in a daze because a can of tomato soup had fallen on her head, and she keeps trying to steal the baby back. After that it was the Nancy Drew series, and I was hooked.

  You once worked as a stewardess, and presumably you have traveled quite a bit. Any observations about what people read on airplanes and how that’s changed over the years? What do you like to read on the plane?

  When I was a flight stewardess with Pan American a thousand years ago, everyone was carrying a book. Now everyone seems to be carrying a computer or looking at the television. A few years ago, I got on the plane and smiled to see a woman deeply engrossed in one of my books. I settled myself and a few minutes later glanced back. She was in a dead sleep. On a plane, I like to catch up with what my suspense writer friends are up to and grab their latest on the way to the plane.

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

  The Constitution, with emphasis on the First Amendment.

  What is your ideal reading experience? Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh, or makes you cry? One that teaches you something, or one that distracts you?

  I want to be emotionally involved with the characters, to laugh or cry with them, to yearn for things to turn out right for them. I don’t think there is any book that can’t teach you something, even if it is how not to tell a story.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

  The Good Earth, A Girl of the Limberlost, The Secret Garden, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Favorite character was Jane Eyre after I saw the first movie and before I read the book.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

  Honestly not fair to answer. If I start a book that I’m supposed to like and don’t like, I put it down. Maybe if I gave it a longer shot I might have loved it. We’ll never know.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?

  For years I admired Morris West from afar. Then I met him briefly at a cocktail party. His agent, a personal friend of mine, called the next morning: “Mary, where did you go? After the cocktails, Morris said, ‘Let’s collect Mary Clark and go to dinner.’” I wanted to kill myself. I had slipped away to a teacher’s retirement dinner. But later, on a publicity trip to Australia, I visited him and his family at home. Years later he asked me for a blurb for his new book. I was thrilled.

  What are your reading habits? Are you a fast or slow reader? Do you take notes? Do you read print or electronic?

  I’m a fast reader. I only take notes if it’s for research purposes. I love the convenience of electronic, especially when I’m traveling, but love best the feel and smell of a print book.

  What book made you want to become a writer?

  I was writing from the time I could put words in a sentence. My one gift has been to be a storyteller.

  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite?

  That would be like asking me which of my children is my favorite.

  What’s your favorite movie based on one of your books?

  Sadly, I’m still waiting.

  What’s the best suspense novel you’ve ever read?

  The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Runner-up, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

  What do you plan to read next?

  The latest P. D. James. She’s a marvelous writer and at age ninety-one gives me hope for my own future of continuing to be a storyteller.

  Mary Higgins Clark has written suspense novels, collections of short stories, a historical novel, children’s books, and a memoir.

  * * *

  I’d Love to Host a Literary Dinner Party With …

  José Martí, because he lived so many lives and because he was such a fantastic writer and because, damn it, he was José Martí (he also lived in the New York City area, so that will help the conversation). Octavia Butler because she’s my personal hero, helped give the African diaspora a future (albeit a future nearly as dark as our past), and because I’d love to see her again. And Arundhati Roy because I’m still crushing on her mind and on The God of Small Things.

  —Junot Díaz

  Sappho, for a bit of ancient gender politics; Aphra Behn for theater gossip; and George Eliot because everyone who knew her said she was fascinating. All women, because they know how to get talking about the nitty-gritty so quickly and are less prone to telling anecdotes. I’d have gone for Jane Austen if I weren’t convinced she’d just have a soft-boiled egg and leave early.

  —Emma Thompson

  Well, I eat dinner with writers a lot, and—like eating with children—the experience can really go both ways. I’d probably make it potluck, and then invite the best cooks who are (or were) also good company. If you were to assign writers an Invitability Score (prose style × kitchen chops × congeniality at the table), Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) is always going to rate pretty high.

  —Michael Chabon

  First I call Shakespeare. “Who else is coming?” Shakespeare asks. “Tolstoy,” I answer. “I’m busy that night,” Shakespeare says. Next I call Kafka, who agrees to come. “As long as you don’t invite Tolstoy.” “I already invited Tolstoy,” I tell him. “But Kundera’s coming. You like Milan. And you guys can speak Czech.” “I speak German,” Kafka corrects me. When Tolstoy hears that Kundera’s coming, he drops out. (Something about an old book review.) So finally I call Joyce, who’s always available. When we get to the restaurant, Kafka wants a table in back. He’s afraid of being recognized. Joyce, who’s already plastered, says, “If anyone’s going to be recognized, it’s me.” Kundera leans over and whispers in my ear, “People might recognize us too if we went around with a cane.” The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.

  —Jeffrey Eugenides

  I know I should use my time machine to go deep-canonical, but the prospect of trying to navigate a dinner party with Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, and Honoré de Balzac—figuring out what I could say to them, or what they could say to each other—is beyond my capacities as a bon vivant. Instead, I think I’d want to hang out with three guys I just missed out on knowing, a group more “relatable” to twentieth-century me—Don Carpenter, Philip K. Dick, and Malcolm Braly. They’re all, as it happens, semi-outlaw types with Marin County connections, so they’d probably have a good time if thrown together. And I could flatter myself and claim I’ve been implicated in the revival of each of their posthumous careers, so we’d have something to raise a glass or spark a joint to. I’d be thrilled to let them know they’re in print.

  —Jonathan Lethem

  * * *

  Drew Gilpin Faust

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It (Library of America). I always seem to be reading several books at once.

  Where and when do you like to read?

  Everywhere and anywhere—but always at night before I go to sleep.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Not having read Huckleberry Finn since high school, I returned to it last summer—ordering it on my Kindle on a bit of a wh
im. I was astonished to find how much of what I had been teaching and studying about race and slavery in American history was already there in a book published in 1884. The book offers as well striking—and eerily modern, or perhaps postmodern in their critical renderings of “reality”—insights into the masks and dissimulations that structure social order.

  Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  Both. I am a historian, so of course I read history. But now as Harvard president I have license and reason to read across the fields represented at the university. I also enjoy contemporary fiction, and I am a detective story addict.

  My responsibilities as president include international travel, and for me, trip planning always includes reading. I have recently been immersed in books about India, which I visited in January. I have explored both fiction and nonfiction: current affairs, history, art and architecture, and some wonderful novels—Mistry, Desai, Rushdie, Ghosh.

  What was the best book you read as a student?

  Albert Camus’s La Peste—The Plague—had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from La Peste. For a student during the 1960s, existentialism’s emphasis on meaning as the product of action and engagement was very alluring.