By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  —Dave Eggers

  I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. Donald Sobol passed recently, and that really brought it all back to me, how important his books were to my little self. I didn’t learn to read until I was seven, so I missed out on the early stuff, jumped right to chapter books, right to Encyclopedia Brown. What I loved about Boy Detective Leroy Brown was that (1) he was unabashedly smart (smart was not cool when and where I grew up) and (2) his best friend was a girl, tough Sally Kimball, who was both Leroy’s bodyguard and his intellectual equal. Sobol did more to flip gender scripts in my head than almost anybody in my early years.

  —Junot Díaz

  My sister and I loved Encyclopedia Brown, the fifth-grade nerd/observer who seldom took more than a day to unravel the nefarious conspiracies of childhood. Every child detective requires a sidekick, obviously, and I thought Encyclopedia’s sidekick, Sally Kimball, was way cooler than any of Nancy Drew’s. In addition to being smart, Sally was the only kid in town who could beat up Bugs Meany. But as a child I treasured the idea of this infinitely just place called Idaville. In Idaville the weak were rarely bullied for long, and the bad guys didn’t get away.

  —Katherine Boo

  I have tattoos from children’s books all over my arms and torso. The biggest one is of Ferdinand the bull, which Elliott Smith also had, but his was a different page. What a good message that book has! Just be yourself and don’t gore anyone with your horns if you don’t feel like it.

  —Lena Dunham

  The D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants. The Phantom Tollbooth. A Wizard of Earthsea. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Harriet the Spy. John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy. Bradbury’s R Is for Rocket. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I loved trickster heroes … and Holmes.

  —Michael Chabon

  A Wrinkle in Time saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was eight years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it—in the plot, the people, and the emotional truth of their experience. This place was never a good match for me, but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.

  —Anne Lamott

  We constantly read these terribly violent stories by the Grimm Brothers. I mean, the cleaned-up versions of these are nowhere near the horror stories we used to read. It’s no wonder my brother was a total scaredy-cat and afraid to walk home alone after you realize he had been exposed to the tales of the Grimm Brothers.

  —Arnold Schwarzenegger

  I was a very unliterary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don’t read. Lego was my thing, as well as practical books like See Inside a Nuclear Power Station. It wasn’t till early adolescence that I saw the point of books and then it was the old stalwart, The Catcher in the Rye, that got me going.

  —Alain de Botton

  * * *

  Colin Powell

  What book is on your night stand now?

  The Summer of 1787, by David O. Stewart. As I grow older, I am increasingly fascinated by our founding fathers. The challenges they faced and the compromises they made, good and bad, to create a nation have inspired us and people around the world. I wish today’s political leaders, especially in Washington, would show the courage and willingness to fight for what they believe in, but possess an understanding of the need to compromise to solve the nation’s problems. They all need to go off and read 1787.

  When and where do you like to read?

  On a plane. No phones, e-mails, or meetings to interfere. I used to read in bed, until I started to fall asleep after two minutes of reading anything.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Sorry, can’t answer. I find some greatness in almost every book. It’s like asking which is my greatest kid.

  Are you a rereader? What book do you read over and over again?

  It’s a book I’ve had for over fifty years called The Armed Forces Officer. It was written by Brigadier S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall. After World War II he was commissioned to review the actions of our soldiers and provide a historically based book of guidance for army officers. It is one of the finest leadership books I’ve ever read and was given to every officer back then. It was always with me and is right in front of me now. It once went out of print, and I was able to persuade the Pentagon to reissue it with a new cover and an update. The book has received more updates and can now even be found on Amazon.

  Right next to it is The Professional Soldier, by Morris Janowitz. It was published in 1960, two years after I became an officer. It is a sociological analysis of the military officer at that time. I learned that the average senior army officer was white, a West Pointer, rural, and an Episcopalian from South Carolina. I nailed one out of five. In my early years in the army, my focus was on learning about and understanding my chosen profession. I was studying to be a good lieutenant. And, of course, the Bible.

  What was the best book you read as a student? What books over the years have most influenced your thinking?

  In high school, I finally was required to do serious reading. I don’t recall how or why, but the first big, serious adult book I picked up was Tales of the South Pacific, by James Michener. Romance, mystery, geography, geology, culture, history, language, and fauna, all blended together in one hypnotic book. I couldn’t wait for Return to Paradise. And I read every single one until there were no new ones. For most of my military career, my reading was historical, leadership, management theory, and military and political autobiographies and biographies. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and Dean Acheson’s were standards to be inhaled. Street Without Joy, by Bernard Fall, was a textbook for those of us going to Vietnam in the first wave of President Kennedy’s advisers. This Kind of War, by T. R. Fehrenbach, was a classic history of the Korean War and the cost of unpreparedness.

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? What book would you require all heads of state to read?

  The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. Theories and grand ideas are important. But they seldom unfold as planned. People—it is all about people.

  Do you tend to hold on to books or give them away?

  We have hundreds of books in our home; my wife, Alma, is a voracious reader. We purge them once a year and give the purged ones to the annual book fair at the State Department conducted by the Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide. We purge until we have several empty bookshelves waiting for new books. I have a pretty good collection of books on African-American history, especially military history. I never purge those, and they will be sent to a library after I’ve passed on to the remainder table.

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

  There is only one that I remember vividly, My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Growing up in the South Bronx, the story of a couple of kids my age growing up on the great prairie of Nebraska was exciting and took me to a place far away from “Fort Apache, the Bronx.” I loved the story of life in a full circle touching on love, adversity, tragedy, hope, and optimism.

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

  Most contemporary political memoirs, including mine, My American Journey. Once you do the index search on yourself or a particular issue, they tend to become uninteresting. In my case, after telling the story of my growing up in New York and my early years in the army, it was time to tell the story of my chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As we worked our way through the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, the invasion of Panama and Desert Storm, my collaborator, Joe Persico, looked over at me one day and said: “Do you know how boring this stuff is? Let’s drop it. It’s becoming a ‘Then I had lunch with…’ book. Everyone knows this stuff, lived through it, and won’t be interested.”

  I refused and wrote it all out for two hundred more pages. Joe was
right. In the seventeen years since it was published, I’ve gotten very few questions about any of that stuff, but there is still a lot of interest in the first half of the book. It is still selling. I learned my lesson, and my new book, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership, consists of just stand-alone stories and is half the size of the usual political memoir. Unfortunately, I don’t believe the genre has improved in recent years.

  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?

  I would enjoy having lunch with J. K. Rowling. I’d probe her imagination and ask how she is dealing so well with her success and multimillionaire celebrity status. When I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I wrote a letter to Stephen Ambrose after I read his classic Band of Brothers, about E Company, 506th Infantry, in World War II. I complimented him on the book and shared with him my pride in having a battalion of the 506th Infantry under my brigade command in the 1970s. I also once wrote your language expert Bill Safire, disagreeing with one of his On Language pronouncements. He met me more than halfway.

  Electronic or paper?

  I do both.

  What book made you want to become a writer?

  My checkbook. After thirty-five years of military pay and educating three kids through college, I needed to improve my finances. I was also moved by the success of my buddy Gen. Norm Schwarzkopf’s book, It Doesn’t Take a Hero. But what really did it was my agent, Marvin Josephson, and editor, Harry Evans, convincing me I had a good story to tell. I still feel strange being called a writer. I’m mostly a speaker.

  If somebody walked into your office while you were writing, what would they see?

  Three computers running, paper strewn all about, a television on behind me, a sense of chaos.

  If you had to recommend one book to a student of government, what would it be?

  There is none, and I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone. Government requires many disciplines and experiences. And even if you are widely read, it is still OJT, On-the-Job Training. Government is people, and until you know the people you can’t follow, govern, or lead them.

  What do you plan to read next?

  Sigh. That’s a problem. I keep sending new books to my e-reader, and I don’t know which one I’ll read next. Electronic books have become such an impulse and instinct purchase that I buy them constantly and can’t remember what’s on my e-shelf. When I do look, I often see titles I don’t recognize or don’t remember wanting or buying. I’ll get to some of them.

  Colin Powell is a former secretary of state, national security adviser, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His books include My American Journey and It Worked for Me.

  Dave Eggers

  What book is on your night stand now?

  I’m reading a short story collection by Tom Barbash called Stay Up with Me. It’s not out yet, and probably won’t be for a year or so, but it’s so good.

  What was the last truly great book you read? Do you remember the last time you said to someone, “You absolutely must read this book”?

  I’m in a weird position with that question, given we publish books at McSweeney’s, and every one of them has to pass that “You must read this book!” test before we decide to publish it. I hope I can mention one recent book we put out called Inside This Place, Not of It, edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi. It’s a book of oral histories from incarcerated women in the United States, and every story is shocking—women shackled to beds during childbirth, women given hysterectomies against their will, and the omnipresent sexual abuse at the hands of guards. Massive reform is needed immediately.

  What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  Lately I’ve been reading ghost stories and have been having a blast. At a yard sale, I found a collection Hitchcock edited called Stories Not for the Nervous; it’s solid all the way through.

  Take a moment to champion unheralded writers. Who do you think is egregiously overlooked or underrated?

  I don’t know if he’s unheralded, but there’s a writer named J. Malcolm Garcia who continually astounds me with his energy and empathy. He writes powerful and lyrical nonfiction from Afghanistan, from Buenos Aires, from Mississippi, all of it urgent and provocative. I’ve been following him wherever he goes.

  What were your most cherished books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?

  When I was a kid, I drew a lot, so I gravitated to oversized books with a lot of artwork—books about giants, gnomes, Norse myths, and space travel. There was one called 21st Century Foss, full of incredible imaginings of spaceships and future cities, all with radical and organic shapes. I hadn’t seen it in thirty years and recently bought it on eBay. Looking at those pictures again was like reliving dreams I had when I was eight years old.

  You cofounded 826 National, an organization dedicated to motivating young people to write. Was there a particular book that motivated you? A book that you find often motivates the children you work with?

  The greatest motivator for a kid to write, I think, is having an encouraging and open-minded reader. At 826, we train our tutors to be encouraging of young writers, no matter how unusual the subject matter or where their writing skills are. The two things that stunt kids more than anything else are 1) the fear that whatever they want to write about won’t be acceptable, or 2) that their first drafts have to be perfect. Kids have to know, without a doubt, that writing about anything, even flatulent hamsters, is OK, and that writing can and should be fun at that age. But when you say, your paper has to be five paragraphs long, this many sentences per paragraph, and about “appropriate” subject matter, then you’re guaranteeing paralysis from young writers. You’ve got to remove the tethers to get them started. Then you can get at the grammar on the back end.

  Is there one book you wish all kids would read?

  For ten years I’ve been teaching a high school class that puts together the anthology The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and from these students I’ve learned that there’s no one book or kind of writing that works for everyone. I’m always surprised at the range of reactions to just about anything. But for reluctant readers, the rule of thumb is that you have to meet them where they live. You probably shouldn’t give a reluctant reader The Scarlet Letter or Middlemarch. You can work their way up to the canon, but start with something more immediately relevant to their lives.

  Any bad book habits? Do you tend not to finish books? Skim? Scribble in margins? Fall asleep while reading?

  All of the above. I put books down all the time. I mark them up, fold page corners. And I fall asleep, sure. Most of my books have gotten wet because I read in the tub.

  Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?

  I usually feel too close to whatever book I last wrote, but in this case I have to say that I like A Hologram for the King best. It’s different than the book I thought I was writing, so I can look at it with some distance.

  What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

  I have to go back to the issue of women in American prisons. I really wish Michelle Alexander, who wrote The New Jim Crow, about African-American men in prisons, would write a sequel, focusing on the plight of women. (I’m being greedy here, given she wrote the intro to Inside This Place.) There are tens of thousands of women doing decades for nonviolent offenses, and the abuse they suffer behind bars is virtually a given. Given Alexander’s skills and audience, an exposé on the subject would have a critical impact.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

  George Orwell. I would start by asking about the mustache.

  And among authors you’ve met already, who most impressed you?

  Christopher Hitchens was the most erudite and eloquent human I’ve ever met. He could speak on any topic, any hour of the day or night, at length, and captivate anyone in the room. I didn’t agree
with all of his politics, but he was always an extremely warm and generous man.

  Is there a writer you consider to be a mentor or model in some way?

  William T. Vollmann’s range inspires me—and his empathy and curiosity. He gives absolutely everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I try to follow his lead on that.

  Where do you get your books? Are you a downloader, online shopper, borrower, used-bookstore browser?

  I’m a paper-only reader, and I get most of my books at the independent bookstores in the Bay Area. I like used books, too, so I raid the big used-book sales the libraries around here put on. That’s where you can fill any holes in your collection for, say, a buck a book. Once I got a full Balzac set for twenty dollars. Not bad.

  What do you plan to read next?

  A few years ago a poet named Arif Gamal gave me his book, Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode, and after reading and loving the first few pages, I lost it. I found it the other day while cleaning my office, and now am about halfway through it. It’s an epic poem about growing up in northern Sudan, and it’s really beautiful, unlike anything I can remember. I’m so glad I found it again. Feels like some kind of reunion.

  Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, How We Are Hungry, You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, Zeitoun, and A Hologram for the King, among other books.

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  My Library

  At home we have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of beautiful leather-bound editions of classic literature that my husband has bought for years. They are mostly decoration: they look smart. Personally, I have my own bookshelves for books in Spanish that I keep because they are hard to get in the United States. All the rest comes and goes. I don’t collect anything, not even good novels. Once a year I gather all the books I have read already or will not read ever (several boxes) and give them away. I don’t miss them, because if needed I can buy them again.