By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  What was the last book that made you cry?

  I’m not usually one for leaving tear stains in the margins, but in recent weeks I caught myself sobbing twice—while reading a Saunders story and a forthcoming book by my friend David Finkel. Finkel’s first book, The Good Soldiers, followed a battalion charged with carrying out George W. Bush’s “surge.” The new book follows some of those veterans as they struggle to reintegrate themselves into American life, and it’s devastating.

  The last book that made you laugh?

  Spilt Milk, by the Brazilian novelist Chico Buarque. A deathbed monologue about class, race, love, and political history has no right to be this funny.

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

  Shakespeare’s underrated Troilus and Cressida, a story of flawed people in a transactional historical context that renders notions of pure love absurd. It’s a love story for our time that just happened to be written at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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

  I’m useless when I meet writers I love—I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. So I’m happy, even in my fantasy life, to give the Great Ones their space. It’s enough to know them from what they put on the page.

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

  My top-ten list is an unstable thing, with new favorites regularly charging in and threatening to unseat the venerables, but Joseph Roth, Herman Melville, and George Eliot and Orwell are always on it. First among my contemporaries would have to be the late Roberto Bolaño. The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile double-handedly yanked me out of a depression several years back, and reading 2666 while reporting in the slums was like a little miracle.

  I was working my butt off trying to investigate the violent deaths of some homeless children, under circumstances that had been covered up by the police, when I reached the section of 2666 entitled “The Part About the Crimes.” It begins with a relentless, near-forensic account of corpses and injustices (closely based on the murders of poor women in Juarez) that opens out into this fevered exploration of both the psychological cost of paying attention to the tragedies of others and the social cost of looking away. That section of the book undid me so thoroughly that I’ll probably never reread it, even though I surely grasped only a sliver of what Bolaño was trying to say. And I suppose that’s the built-in sorrow of my life’s most profound encounters with books, beginning with A Wrinkle in Time in third grade. To reread what you loved most at a particular moment is to risk the possibility that you might love it less, and I want to keep my memories undegraded.

  If you had to give reading assignments to an aspiring journalist, what books would make the top of your list?

  Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; Anna Funder’s Stasiland; Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea; Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family; Philip Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan genocide; Joe Sacco’s graphic reportage; The Corner, by David Simon and Ed Burns; and Denis Johnson’s nonfiction collection Seek, mainly for the piece about trying to meet Charles Taylor during the Liberian civil war. I could go on and on, but I’d probably end the list with Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. It’s about the animating power of doubt and correction, and a lack of self-certainty is something my favorite nonfiction writers seem to have in common.

  Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

  Marilynne Robinson

  When and where do you like to read?

  I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention. I read whenever I can, when I am not preparing to teach, or writing.

  What is your favorite book (or story) in the Bible, and why?

  The Bible is a very great literature, profoundly self-referential. My favorite book or story tends to be the one I’ve read or thought about most recently. For the moment, that is the Gospel of John and the Gospels generally. But the Old Testament is full of splendid things, too. Joseph and his brothers, David and Absalom—narratives that are as fine as any to be found anywhere.

  Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

  I do reread. I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.

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

  Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. Every period is trapped in its own assumptions, ours, too, so I am always trying, without much optimism, to put together a sort of composite of the record we have made that gives a larger sense of the constant at work in it all, that is, ourselves. The project is doomed from the outset, I know. Still.

  What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

  If you are surprised by arcana, the list would be very long. I should mention that Lombard’s Sentences is now in English translation.

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

  I remember reading books that overpowered me, when I was still young enough to be an ideal reader. Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads. These are books I have never reread because I am afraid I would dispel the fascination they had for me, a state of mind I hope to recover when I suspend my own disbelief and write fiction. Poe and Dickens were important to me, and before them The Yearling and The Secret Garden.

  What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?

  Reference books in the dining room, older books needing and deserving protection in bookcases in the living room, theology and philosophy on shelves in the bedroom, classical and ancient Near Eastern literature in the study, modern history and Americana in the room that has only bookshelves in it, unclassifiable books in stacks on the stairs.

  During the long years between Housekeeping and Gilead, did you ever despair of being an author of more than one novel?

  My greatest fear was that I would write a fraudulent book simply to escape the embarrassments of having written only one novel. If there is nothing fictional on my mind I do best to concern myself with other things. I wrote a fair amount of nonfiction during those years and was absorbed by that work. Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

  In Home, you quickly revisited the characters from Gilead. Do you foresee ever returning to Ruth and Sylvie and the rest of the Housekeeping crew?

  I actually waited for Ruth and Sylvie to stop haunting my imagination. Finally they did stop. After Gilead I realized I was being haunted again, and I decided to let these souls have more life, since they seemed to want it. If there was a time when I could have done the same for Ruth and Sylvie, that time passed.

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

  A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them are frustrated by the thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language, of ordinary contact even with the people they know best and love best. They turn to writing for this reason. I think many of them are magnanimous in a degree their lives cannot otherwise express. To meet Emily Dickinson or Henry James would be, from their side, to intrude on them, maybe even to make them feel inadequate to expectation. I can’t imagine being
a sufficient reason for the disruption. We do have their books. That said, I would like to meet William James.

  If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?

  Ishmael.

  What do you plan to read next?

  The Cotton Kingdom, by Frederick Law Olmsted.

  Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Mother Country, among other books.

  * * *

  Childhood Idols

  My 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.

  —J. K. Rowling

  Edmund from the Narnia books is an interesting one. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he commits an act of exquisite treachery by refusing to corroborate Lucy’s experiences in Narnia, before selling his siblings for a box of crack-laced Turkish delight. Way to go, Ed. Yet by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund has evolved the strength of character to tell Eustace calmly, “You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.” Stumbling heroes linger longer.

  —David Mitchell

  Hermione. Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he’s chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione—she’s working harder than anyone, she’s half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn’t be there at all. It’s so unfair that Harry’s the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.

  —Ira Glass

  My favorite character was Julius Caesar. His leadership style was refreshingly different from my grade school principal’s.

  —P. J. O’Rourke

  Jo March in Little Women. She wanted to be a writer, she became a writer. She stopped caring that she wasn’t pretty. She sold her hair to send her mother to visit their father during the Civil War. I even forgave her for not marrying Laurie.

  —Anna Quindlen

  As with a lot of writers of my generation, it’s Harriet the Spy. My recollection is that her creator, Louise Fitzhugh, died in her forties. Did she have any idea how many young people decided to be writers after reading her two books about Harriet? I hope she had at least an inkling.

  —Jonathan Franzen

  I identified with orphans, like Anne of Green Gables, or pioneers, like the characters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or children who slipped in and out of different worlds and dimensions, like the siblings in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And of course there was the writer, Jo, in Little Women. I loved the brother and sister in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who run away from home and survive among works of beauty. I never go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art without thinking of them.

  —Jhumpa Lahiri

  I didn’t know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

  —Richard Dawkins

  After I read Charlotte’s Web, I became so obsessed with pigs that my stepfather got me one for my ninth birthday. It was because of that pig that I became a vegetarian. That’s impact.

  —Ann Patchett

  As someone who was sent off to boarding school, I’d have to cop to cliché and say Holden Caulfield. But it would have been a heckuva lot more fun to be Hawkeye, of The Last of the Mohicans.

  —Christopher Buckley

  * * *

  Sheryl Sandberg

  What was the best book you read last year?

  I absolutely loved Tina Fey’s Bossypants and didn’t want it to end. It’s hilarious as well as important. Not only did I laugh on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy. On page three, she offers amazing advice to women in the workplace: “No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say, ‘Never let them see you cry.’ I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.)” It is so, so good. As a young girl, I was labeled bossy, too, so as a former—OK, current—bossypants, I am grateful to Tina for being outspoken, unapologetic, and hysterically funny.

  When and where do you like to read? Paper or electronic?

  I probably shouldn’t admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books. (In Lean In, I also admit that I carry a notebook and pen around to keep track of my to-do list, which, at Facebook, is like carrying around a stone tablet and chisel.) I travel with an iPad, but at home I like holding a book open and being able to leaf through it, highlight with a real yellow pen, and dog-ear important pages. After I finish a book, I’ll often look to see how many page corners are turned down as one gauge of how much I liked it. I also still read newspapers and magazines the old-fashioned way; I tried the Kindle app for the iPad on the elliptical, but when you get sweaty, you can’t turn the pages.

  Are you a fast or slow reader? How many books would you say you read in a year?

  I am painfully slow and don’t get through nearly as many books as I want to. I pile them up on my night stand, and when the piles start tipping over, I force myself to speed up or to give up on the ones that, realistically, I am never going to get to.

  Recommend the best business book you’ve read in recent years.

  Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. This book has been instrumental in how we think about developing talent at Facebook. Like all organizations, we have a system for giving feedback to our employees. A few years ago, Lori Goler, Facebook’s head of human resources, brought Marcus to meet with our leadership team to help us improve this system. Marcus and his colleagues surveyed employees for twenty-five years to figure out what factors predict extraordinary performance. They found that the most important predictor of the success of a company or division was how many people answered yes to the question “Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” And this makes sense. Most performance reviews focus more on “development areas” (a.k.a. weaknesses) than strengths. People are told to work harder and get better at those areas, but people don’t have to be good at everything. At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people’s natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.

  And what’s the best book about technology? Is there a book that really gets Silicon Valley right?

  The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries, provides a great inside look at how the tech industry approaches building products and businesses. Traditionally, companies have depended on elaborate business plans and in-depth tests to put out a “perfect” product. Ries advocates that for tech, a better way to perfect a product is to introduce it to the market and get customers using it and giving feedback, so you can learn and then iterate. (Facebook figured out this approach long ago. We even have posters all over our buildings that remind people, “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping.”)

  Who are your favorite authors?

  Michael Lewis’s ability to boil down the most complicated subjects is like a magic trick. You can’t believe your eyes. He takes on important issues—from the 2008 Wall Street crash in The Big Short to parenting in Home Game—and breaks them down to their deepest truths. His combination of an extraordinary analytical mind and a deep understanding of human nature allows him to weave together data and events to offer a fresh and insightful narrative. Whatever the topic, the result is always compelling and even thrilling. I am in awe of him.

  Somewhere in that pile of books on my night stand sits a well-worn copy of Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life. I’ve read it before—and I will read it again—and just knowing it’s at my bedside gives me comfort. Her wisdom resonates for me on the deepest level: “But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entir
e life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart.” Perfect.

  I can’t list my favorite authors without including my college roommate Caroline Weber. I love her books because I hear about them from start to finish—with the many ups and downs that go into publishing. Much of what she writes is for the comp lit crowd—not tech execs—but she is always willing to explain passages to me. In 2007, she published the brilliant and fun Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. There are few books that I have enjoyed as much. And while I admit I’m biased, it’s not just me—The Washington Post Book World named it one of the best books of the year.

  How do you organize your personal library? Do you hold on to all books or do you like to streamline?

  My husband is a streamliner; I am a pack rat. I’ve even hung on to all my textbooks from college—you know, just in case I have the sudden urge to read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.

  What are your most cherished books, and where do you keep them?

  I keep my books from Helen Vendler’s college class on American poets in my night stand (inside the drawer, not to be confused with the stack piled up on top). Professor Vendler says that you don’t own a poem until you memorize it, and I agree. Every year my New Year’s resolution is to meditate for just five minutes a day. I never do it, but when I recite one of the poems I memorized, I think it comes close to having the same effect.