by Pamela Paul
What book should every business executive read?
Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values, by Fred Kofman, had a profound effect on my career and life. I think about his lessons almost every day—the importance of authentic communication, impeccable commitments, being a player not a victim, and taking responsibility. I have given this book to so many team members at work, and I’ve seen it inspire people overnight to be more aware of their actions and impact on others.
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 wanted to be Meg Murry, the admittedly geeky heroine of A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. I loved how she worked with others to fight against an unjust system and how she fought to save her family against very long odds. I was also captivated by the concept of time travel. I keep asking Facebook’s engineers to build me a tesseract so I, too, could fold the fabric of time and space. But so far no one has even tried.
Choosing one book (and album) for all children to read is easy: Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me. Its messages are—sadly—still relevant today, but its stories are beautifully written.
What books have you enjoyed reading with your own children? Is there a book you particularly love to read to them?
I cherish the day my daughter learned to recite “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too” from Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Just thinking about it makes me smile. And both my kids first learned to understand numbers from Silverstein’s poem “Smart.”
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I would love to meet J. K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every Harry Potter book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.
Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer at Facebook and the author of Lean In.
Caroline Kennedy
What was the best book you read last year?
The most shocking book I read last year was Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas Blackmon. I hadn’t heard of it when I picked it up even though it won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago, so I was doubly shocked by the story it tells. The detailed chronicle of the institutional scale of horrific oppression and criminal behavior by local government and corporate interests was truly jaw-dropping, although it probably shouldn’t have been.
The best fiction book I read was The Yellow Birds, by the Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, which is about to get the PEN/Hemingway Award. That’s especially nice as the award will be presented at the JFK Library by Patrick Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway’s son), because Hemingway’s papers are located there.
Your favorite book of all time?
An impossible question. Two books that made me cry real tears were Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, and A Death in the Family, by James Agee. Two books that made me laugh out loud were A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, and Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis.
When and where do you like to read?
I am not picky—if possible I would like to read in Rome or Paris, but since that’s usually not an option, I like to read in bed.
Paper or electronic?
I tried electronic, but I couldn’t remember anything—maybe that’s because it was The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels—but probably it’s because I am getting old—so I am now mostly going back to paper. I like to dog-ear important pages, and I don’t know how to do that on my iPad.
Who are your favorite poets? Was there a particular poet you encountered early on who inspired your love of poetry?
One of the best things about creating poetry anthologies is that I have gotten to know some incredible poets whose work I admire. Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, and Naomi Shihab Nye write about contemporary life and relationships. They have introduced me to poems I would not otherwise have read and deepened my understanding of poets like Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks.
What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
Books about the Inquisition and the Crusades are a guilty pleasure because I feel guilty reading bad things about the Catholic Church—though it’s hard to avoid these days. Biographies of famous horses and lives of the saints are among my favorite literary genres.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane, and lots of books about networks, physics, and neurobiology—they belong to my husband.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
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.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
I don’t read much self-help—that comes from talking to people or taking a hot bath. I do read historically oriented books about religion and faith like Edith Hamilton’s Witness to the Truth, which I found in our apartment and had belonged to my mother; or Garry Wills’s What the Gospels Meant, which I bought in an airport. I really enjoyed God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson, and The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century, which my daughter brought home from college.
Where do you get your books? Do you have a favorite bookstore or library?
I love independent bookstores and always get great recommendations from the staff there. I have gotten to visit amazing ones on my book tours—like Parnassus in Nashville, Anderson’s near Chicago, Elliott Bay in Seattle. At home, a lot of the small bookstores have disappeared in my neighborhood, but Crawford Doyle is great. I also love going into a huge Barnes & Noble just to wander around and find things I wasn’t looking for.
What’s the best book you’ve read about the law? Was there a particular book that influenced you as an attorney?
In law school and for the research on my two books on constitutional law, I really enjoyed reading cases and found some of them to be beautifully written. First Amendment writings by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (dissent in Abrams v. U.S.), Louis Brandeis (concurrence in Whitney v. California), and Robert Jackson (West Virginia v. Barnette) are ones that all Americans can understand and be inspired by. I haven’t read many books about the law—but two interesting ones are Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle, the story of the highly publicized trial of a black doctor who tried to move into a white neighborhood and was defended by Clarence Darrow; and The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold, by Geoffrey Robertson. That was the first trial of a head of state for waging war against his own people, and all the prominent lawyers left town rather than be chosen to prosecute the king. A little-known attorney, John Cooke, who eventually brought the case, showed tremendous courage and was himself beheaded by Charles II. It’s also interesting because it was written by a British human rights attorney who is defending Julian Assange.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Whatever it is, I am sure he has read it. Maybe something like Middlemarch, just to take his mind off things and remind him that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?
Both my parents loved to read. My father read lots of history, and his books are among my most treasured possessions. There are a lot on the
American Civil War—both sides. I especially like the ones where he wrote in the margins, like the Federalist Papers, because it’s fascinating to see which parts he thought important. My mother read all the time, and there were piles of literature, poetry, and art books around her room and down the hall. When my brother and I had dinner alone as children, we used to play a guessing game based on the titles in the bookshelves in the dining room. That’s how we learned the names of Winston Churchill’s forty books without actually reading them.
My father used to make up elaborate bedtime stories in which I was the central character, and my mother used to read to me at bedtime. She also taught me to recite Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” and “Second Fig” for my father when I was very little. I felt a tremendous sense of pride and accomplishment, so I had a positive experience with words and ideas when I was very young.
What were your favorite childhood books? Do you have a favorite character or hero?
My favorite childhood books were about horses and adventurous tomboys, like Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink. She was badder than the characters in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, and I liked her much better. My all-time favorite character is probably the Country Bunny, from The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, by DuBose Heyward. I see her now as a woman who reenters the workforce after raising a family—“leans in,” and does it all—much better than the big Jack Rabbits.
What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?
We had it organized by topic for nonfiction and alphabetically by author for fiction and poetry—but then the ceiling leaked and we had to paint the rooms and now it’s every book for itself.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
The last book I put down without finishing was Independent People, by Halldor Laxness—the Icelandic winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. It was recommended by Ann Patchett when I visited her store on a recent book tour, but she said if I wasn’t gripped by page fifty, I should put it down. It didn’t go with anything else I was doing/reading/wearing at the time, but I have a feeling I will give it another try sometime.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I think I would like to meet Charles Dickens—I would just really want to ask him, “Really, how do you do that?”
If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?
I was in love with the Scarlet Pimpernel for a pretty long time, but I don’t know if I would want to meet him now. The moment may have passed for us.
What do you plan to read next?
I just finished a book, so I am looking for suggestions.
Caroline Kennedy is the U.S. ambassador to Japan and the editor of books on American history, politics, constitutional law, and poetry, including She Walks in Beauty and A Family of Poems.
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Stories I’m Drawn To
I love histories, biographies, and memoirs. I’m also drawn to realistic fiction. I’m not a huge fan of experimental fiction, fantasy, or so-called escapist literature. Reality is just so interesting, why would you want to escape it?
—Jeannette Walls
I read nonfiction almost exclusively—both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it’s almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters. I don’t read horror, ever. When I was fifteen, I made the mistake of reading part of The Exorcist. It was the first and last horror book I’ve ever opened.
—Dan Brown
Ironically enough, given the topic of my first novel, I’m wary of books about boarding school. If the author gets the details wrong and caricaturizes the milieu (“My daddy says any family without a Rolls-Royce is living in poverty!”) it’s tedious. But if the author gets the details right, it’s uncomfortably evocative and makes me squirm. All that said, I loved Tobias Wolff’s Old School; I loved Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey (in which Wilsey gets kicked out of one boarding school after another); and I can’t wait to read & Sons, a forthcoming novel by David Gilbert about an author like J. D. Salinger who writes a book like The Catcher in the Rye.
—Curtis Sittenfeld
I like personal dramas set within the sweep of historical events: Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic and Let the Great World Spin, or Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.
—Sting
Like most people, I’m fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect. Wait a minute—basically that’s everybody, isn’t it, in life and on the page? As a writer, I’m drawn to characters who, for one reason or another, seem to find themselves desperately out of joint, alienated but not wanting to be, and ever yearning to understand the rules of the game.
—Chang-rae Lee
I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on. Yes, I enjoy the novels written by lawyer friends, but regard that as a busman’s holiday.
—Scott Turow
I’m not very interested in contemporary American realism, or books about marriage, parenting, suburbia, divorce. Even as a child browsing at the library I distinctly remember avoiding books that had the big silver Caldecott award sticker on the front, because I loved fairy tales, ghost stories, adventures, whereas the Caldecott prize stories often had a dutiful tone that tended more toward social issues. To paraphrase Nabokov: all I want from a book is the tingle down the spine, for my hairs to stand on end.
—Donna Tartt
I’m open to reading almost anything—fiction, nonfiction—as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
—Amy Tan
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
—Jhumpa Lahiri
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Isabel Allende
What’s the last good book you read?
The Death of Bees, by Lisa O’Donnell, the kind of edgy, crazy and horrible story that may well happen anywhere.
When and where do you like to read?
I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp, and two dogs to keep me warm. I have written several historical novels that required a lot of research, and in that case I did most of the reading in my “casita,” where I write. I confess that I am a messy, disorganized, and impatient reader: if the book doesn’t grab me in the first forty pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.
Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
There is so much to read, and time is so short! I am seventy, but I have not yet reached the age when rereading gives more pleasure than the surprise of a new story or a new writer.
What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
I like literary fiction. A good novel or short story is like making love between clean ironed sheets: total pleasure. When I was a teenager my guilty reading was, of course, erotic stuff. At fourteen, living in Lebanon, I discovered the irresistible mixture of eroticism and fantasy reading One Thousand and One Nights inside a closet with a flashlight. Nothing can be compared to the excitement of a forbidden book. Today nothing is forbidden to me, so there is no guilt. Too bad! (My grandchildren would have fits of boredom with the erotic scenes that turned me on in Lebanon.)
Which books might we be surprised to fin
d on your shelves?
You will find too many dictionaries. I write in Spanish, but I have been living in English for twenty-five years with Willie, my gringo husband, who thinks that he speaks Spanish. I end up writing like Willie talks: in Spanglish. I go back and forth between both languages, and sometimes I only remember the word in French. I have dictionaries of synonyms, of colloquialisms, of mythology, even of magical terms.
What do you think of the contemporary state of magic realism? Do you have favorite magic realist novels?
Full-blown magic realism, like in the Latin American boom of literature of the ’70s and ’80s, is not fashionable anymore, but elements of it are still present in novels all over the world, even in English; think Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, for example. Magic realism is not a literary trick for me. I accept that the world is a very mysterious place.
What’s the best book you’ve read about Chile?
This question is almost impossible to answer. I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
In my teens I read Russian, French, and English novelists that taught me about good storytelling. In my twenties I started reading the great writers of the Latin American boom (all of them male, unfortunately). They were a choir of different and harmonious voices narrating our crazy continent to the world and to us, Latin Americans. One Hundred Years of Solitude made me want to become a writer. García Márquez characters resembled my own family; his voice seemed easy. I thought, “If this guy can do it, so can I.”
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?