By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  What books had the greatest influence on you when you were a student?

  The French essayist Roland Barthes was, and in many ways continues to be, my greatest influence. I responded to his way of approaching very large topics (love, the meaning of literature, photography) in oblique ways, with great formal innovation and originality. His essay on photography, Camera Lucida, is a model of what a highly rigorous but personal essay should be like. I couldn’t have written my first book, On Love, without reading his A Lover’s Discourse. Barthes taught me courage and innovation at the level of form.

  What was the last book that made you cry?

  I’m always close to tears reading Judith Kerr’s delightful children’s story, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It tells of a tiger who turns up, quite unexpectedly, at teatime at the house of a girl called Sophie and her mother. You’d expect them to panic, but they take the appearance of this visitor entirely in their stride—and their reaction is a subtle invitation for us to approach life’s unexpected challenges with resilience and good humor.

  The last book that made you laugh?

  I’ve been reading a nonfiction cartoon called Couch Fiction, by a British psychoanalyst, Philippa Perry. The book is simply the best single volume on analysis I’ve ever read, and takes us through one man’s analysis and his attempts to resolve a range of problems with his mother and his girlfriend. It’s done with images and speech bubbles by Junko Graat; it’s constantly charming and always deeply accurate and thought provoking.

  The last book that made you furious?

  I got very angry about the food industry reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent Eating Animals. Now, a few years later, I’m bewildered and deeply worried by the way one can be impressed and moved by a book and yet do absolutely nothing about one’s indignation and simply put all the good arguments to one’s side—frightening evidence of the impotence of books in the hands of fickle readers.

  What’s the best love story you’ve ever read?

  Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is like a distillation of all the themes of the Western approach to love. It’s also a study in immaturity. Werther’s love for Charlotte depends on not being reciprocated. Had she said yes, his love might have foundered in the routines of child care. In other words, it’s a love story that subtly points out how much the standard love story doesn’t prepare us for what mature relationships are like. It’s a book that should be given to the young, with warning.

  Are there any architects that you think are also particularly good writers? What are your favorite books on architecture?

  Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny, and polemical in the best way. His books are beautifully laid out with captions and images. I recommend Towards a New Architecture. It’s a deep pity that while Le Corbusier’s style has been much copied by architects, very few have drawn the right lessons from him about literature and prose style.

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

  I would have liked to meet John Ruskin, who has been a big influence on me, and whose eccentric visions of the ideal society (at the level of architecture and morality) I am constantly inspired by. He felt sad, persecuted, lonely, and misunderstood. I would have wanted to try to be his friend.

  And if you could meet a character from literature, who would it be?

  Proust’s Albertine sounds high maintenance but rewarding—and, in my eyes, a proper woman, a tomboy, rather than a hermaphrodite.

  Who are your favorite writers of all time? And among your contemporaries?

  My life has been variously overtaken (and ruined by) Montaigne, Stendhal, Freud, and W. H. Auden. I think a lot about W. G. Sebald and Ryszard Kapuscinski. A contemporary of sorts, albeit in a different generation, was Norman Mailer. His largely forgotten book Of a Fire on the Moon fascinates me: a big sprawling essay on technology and America that deserves a wider audience. Among the living, I deeply love: Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth, and Nicholson Baker.

  And if you had to give a young person a list of books to be read above all others to prepare for adulthood, what would you include?

  I’d give them Theodore Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity, a beautiful attempt to connect up the large themes of history with the needs of the individual soul. I’d point them to Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, which opens up the visual arts and psychology. There’s a lot of despair in adolescence, so I’d recommend comfort from pessimists like Pascal and Cioran. I’d especially give them a sad, poignant, questing little book called The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly (written under the alias Palinurus).

  What are you planning to read next?

  I’d love to read Chris Ware’s new book, Building Stories, which was unfortunately out of stock (an extraordinary oversight) and has just become available again. In the meantime, I feel I’m going to have a great time with Douglas Coupland’s new little book about Marshall McLuhan.

  Alain de Botton is the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, and The Consolations of Philosophy, among other books.

  Dave Barry

  What was the best book you read last year?

  Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. I’m probably the last person on the planet to read it; I loved the movie Lincoln and wanted more. I am awed by the amount of research that went into that book. Most of my research consists of brief Google forays in search of factoids that I can distort beyond recognition.

  When and where do you like to read?

  I like to read at the beach, but the beach always turns out to be too relaxing, and I fall asleep after two pages. So I wind up doing most of my actual reading at night in bed, where I sometimes get through as many as three pages before I fall asleep.

  Who are your favorite authors?

  Robert Benchley and P. G. Wodehouse. Also (it goes without saying) Proust.

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

  I like nonfiction, mostly history. My guilty pleasure is tough-guy-loner action novels, like the Jack Reacher series, where the protagonist is an outwardly rugged but inwardly sensitive and thoughtful guy who, through no fault of his own, keeps having to beat the crap out of people.

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

  The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky. I was required to read this book in English class during my freshman year at Haverford College, but I never finished it. I seriously doubt that Dostoyevsky ever finished it. So I figure if the president read it, he could tell me what happens.

  Paper or electronic?

  Definitely paper. I say this because we authors get smaller royalties on e-book sales. So I’d like to start a rumor that electronic books cause fatal diseases and sometimes explode. This must be true, because it’s printed right here in The New York Times.

  Who are the funniest writers alive?

  Roy Blount Jr., Carl Hiaasen, Steve Martin, Andy Borowitz, Alan Zweibel, Gene Weingarten, and Nora Ephron (she’s alive in my heart). Also the Onion guys, and the folks who write South Park, Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Portlandia. Also a surprising number of Internet commenters.

  What’s the funniest book you’ve ever read?

  I’m not sure I could pick just one. The Code of the Woosters is up there. And A Confederacy of Dunces almost made me wet my pants on an airplane.

  What makes a good humor book?

  The most critical element in any work of humor—this is something Plato talked about—is that at least one of the major characters should be an orangutan.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

  I read a lot of comics when I was a kid—Batman, Archie, Richie Rich, pretty much anything unlikely
to inspire intellectual development. I bought comics for a dime each at the Armonk Stationery Store and read them walking home. I also bought a lot of mail-order products advertised in the back of the comics, such as the X-ray vision glasses. It turned out that these glasses did not actually give you X-ray vision. But the Joy Buzzer, used properly, was an effective prank device.

  Later on I became a big fan of Mad magazine. I also read (it goes without saying) a lot of Proust. But the books I read most as a child were the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. I wish that children would read Tom Swift books today, so they would learn that electricity is a powerful force to be used against evil—as in Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone—and not just to download Justin Bieber songs.

  You have a twelve-year-old daughter. Do you recommend books to her or vice versa? Any recent crossover successes?

  I think the last book I recommended that she liked was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She reads a lot, but she prefers The Hunger Games and other works belonging to a genre I would describe as “books that do not generate royalties for her father.”

  What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

  The first time I read a Robert Benchley collection (I don’t remember which one it was; my father had a bunch) I thought, “This is what I want to do.”

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What was the last book you hated? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  I’m not a big fan of the Twilight series. I can’t get past the premise, which is that a group of wealthy, sophisticated, educated, highly intelligent, centuries-old vampires, who can do pretty much whatever they want, have chosen to be … high school students. I simply cannot picture such beings sitting in a classroom listening to a geometry teacher drone on about the cosine. I have more respect for vampires than that.

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

  This may seem self-serving and promotional, but it’s true: I really like the way Insane City came out. It has heart, and—more important—an orangutan.

  Are you a rereader? What books in particular do you find yourself returning to, and why?

  Maybe someday I’ll go back and tackle The Brothers Karamazov again, if the president drops the ball.

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

  Dave Barry: The Greatest Human Ever.

  Dave Barry is the author, most recently, of Insane City, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead, and Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far).

  * * *

  I’d Love to Meet (Continued)

  We would probably all want to meet Shakespeare—or so we think. (We could ask the man if he’d really written all those plays, or if, somehow, he’d acquired them from—who?—Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, perhaps? Wonder what W. S. would say to that.) Some of us have fantasized meeting Emily Dickinson. (The problem is, would either W. S. or E. D. want to meet us? Why?)

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  I wasn’t sure how to answer this one so I discussed it with my twelve-year-old daughter. She suggested Plato. I was impressed. So Plato it is. I think I’d want to ask him how he’d imagine life had changed by 2012.

  —Emma Thompson

  I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. What would I want to know? His gossip, his lovers, his religion (if any), the Silver Street days, his thoughts on England and power in the seventeenth century—as young then as the twenty-first is for us. And why he’s retiring to Stratford. The biographies keep coming, and there’s a great deal we know about Shakespeare’s interactions with institutions of various kinds. England was already a protomodern state that kept diligent records. But the private man eludes us and always will until some rotting trunk in an ancient attic yields a Pepys-like journal. But that’s historically impossible. He’s gone.

  —Ian McEwan

  I would have liked to meet John Ruskin, who has been a big influence on me, and whose eccentric visions of the ideal society (at the level of architecture and morality) I am constantly inspired by. He felt sad, persecuted, lonely and misunderstood. I would have wanted to try to be his friend.

  —Alain de Botton

  Homer. The Bard, being blind and the speaker of an ancient language, would pose a delicious challenge. This is the kind of challenge that any good novel would present. I’d love, after traversing the gulf of communication, to find out what he believed he was doing. I say this because writers, after a while, become fictions themselves. They are, at once, influential and lost to us.

  —Walter Mosley

  Shakespeare, whoever he really was. My dad was among the conspiracy theorists who think that the guy from Stratford-on-Avon wasn’t really the Bard. I’ve got a lot I’d like to ask this fellow.

  —Jeannette Walls

  Joseph Campbell. His writings on semiotics, comparative religion, and mythology (in particular The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces) helped inspire the framework on which I built my character Robert Langdon. The PBS interview series with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers was hands down the most thought-provoking conversation I’ve ever witnessed.

  —Dan Brown

  I already met my hero: Kurt Vonnegut. I wanted to know if he liked Louis Armstrong better than Richard Wagner. I can’t remember the answer. He poured me a drink, and we sat up listening to music. I left his house walking on air, soused, having drunk his liquor and smoked his filterless cigarettes. I asked him why he smoked filterless cigarettes, which are stronger and worse for you. He said, “More value.”

  —James McBride

  * * *

  Katherine Boo

  What book is on your night stand now?

  I’m currently reading Ways of Going Home, by the Chilean novelist and poet Alejandro Zambra. If it’s only half as good as his novella, Bonsai, it’ll still be a fine way to lose a weekend.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  George Saunders’s Tenth of December, as much as I hate to say so given that recent obnoxious headline in The New York Times Magazine [“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year”]. Saunders’s earlier books had left me faintly less amazed than I felt I’d ought to be, but Tenth, in addition to being funny and stylistically cunning, contains some of the best writing about the psychological toll of inequality that I’ve read in years. Plus, like Alice Munro, Saunders knows when to end his stories—the moment when the best choice a writer can make is to slip away and leave the reader to assemble the last parts on her own.

  What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that’s not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure. Among recent happy diversions were Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and the poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, about the drug-hazed Bombay of the 1980s. Fountain, Díaz, Strayed, and Thayil have nothing in common except the most important thing, a total lack of pretension. They don’t beat you down with their self-seriousness, and it’s only when you’re done that you realize how much wiser you are for their books.

  Were there any novels that helped prepare you to enter the world of the slums?

  What helped me prepare for the slum reporting was the immersion work I’d done in the United States. Though every community is different, my personal rule is pretty much the same: It’s OK to feel like an idiot going in as long as you don’t sound like an idiot coming out.

  Where novels come in, for me, is when the reporting stops and the writing begins, because fiction writers seem to know more than nonfiction writers about distillation—conveying their analytical or psychological insights with economy. Being intent on conveying the d
iversity of experiences in a single slum (and equally intent on not writing a thousand-page tome), I paid particular attention to novels where points of view shifted quickly, among them The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany. I’m also obsessed with the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, who stays out of the picture and allows the so-called subjects of his work to emerge gradually.

  Are there any Indian writers with recent or forthcoming books you’re especially excited about?

  Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, about an itinerant laborer in a Delhi slum, is one of my recent favorites—an original sensibility joined to a passion for reported fact. I’m also eagerly awaiting Naresh Fernandes’s The Re-Islanding of Mumbai, which should be out by the end of the year. When deep in my work at Annawadi I found it difficult to meet people from more affluent parts of Mumbai because the disconnects were too great. But talking to Naresh was different. He’s a genuine humanist in an age of very few, and understands the conflicts inherent in a city like Mumbai better than anyone I know.

  Do you ever hear from Corean and Kim, the two women you wrote about in your National Magazine Award–winning New Yorker piece, “The Marriage Cure”?

  Kim’s not been in touch recently, but Corean is doing well, and still fighting like mad on behalf of her children and grandchildren. She’s one of several women I’ve come to know in the course of my work whose example and insight have helped me conduct my own life less ridiculously. In fact I hold her personally responsible for my marriage.

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

  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. About the particular criminals Encyclopedia and Sally outwitted, the only one I remember is a cheater in a disgusting-sneakers competition. 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.