By the Book

by Pamela Paul

Does it have to be just one book? I would send him all my books for free!

  You edited a children’s magazine early in your career and wrote books for children. What makes for good children’s literature? Do you have favorite books for children?

  First of all, books for kids need to be very entertaining. No preaching, no hidden messages, no condescending tone, no didactic stuff. Kids are smart: don’t underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don’t even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error. Kids like fantasy, imagination, humor, adventure, villains, and suspense.

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

  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.

  Do you have a standby cookbook? What books do you keep in the kitchen?

  I cook by memory and instinct, like I do most things in my life. I can’t follow instructions. (I don’t read a manual even when everything else fails.) My husband has a series of cookbooks, and I assume that his favorite one is The Doubleday Cookbook, by Jean Anderson and Elaine Hanna, because it smells like garlic and is filthy with food stains.

  In the bathroom?

  I don’t need to read in the bathroom; it takes me less than a minute.

  And on your coffee tables?

  Art and photography books, illustrated poems by Pablo Neruda, fancy editions of The Divine Comedy and of Pedro de Valdivia’s letters to the king of Spain (he conquered Chile in 1542), etc. All for show. No one reads that stuff.

  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?

  Yes, I remember perfectly, but I won’t tell because I don’t want to offend the author. I would hate it if someone did that to me.

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

  I would love to meet Mark Twain. What a character! I imagine him larger than life, sexy, handsome, full of energy, a grandiose storyteller, a fantastic liar, and a man of heart and principles. I would not ask him anything in particular; I would try to get him a little drunk (it should be easy) and then sit at his feet to listen to his stories.

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

  Zorro, of course. If possible, at night and in bed, with the mask but not the whip.

  What do you plan to read next?

  I just started The Patrick Melrose Novels, by Edward St. Aubyn, because everyone is talking about it. (However, that was not the case with Fifty Shades of Grey; I am too old for bondage.) This book has 680 pages. It will take me a while to start another one … unless I get acute hepatitis. But on my night table is Tenth of December, by George Saunders, waiting its turn.

  Isabel Allende is the author of The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, and The Island Beneath the Sea, among other works.

  Anna Quindlen

  What’s your favorite book of all time?

  That is so exactly like being asked which is your favorite child. Middlemarch, because I think of it as perfection, although I am not as enamored of Eliot’s other work? Bleak House, because I’ve learned so much from all of Dickens? Pride and Prejudice, because I’m thoroughly satisfied every time I finish? Too tough to declare a winner.

  Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

  I can read almost anywhere: subway, plane, car (although not while I myself am driving). But I have a big chair with an ottoman in a corner off the living room, and that’s probably where I like to read best, usually in the evenings, sometimes on paper, sometimes on iPad. I acquired that chair specifically for purposes of reading and the little table next to it specifically for the putting down of a book.

  Who are your favorite novelists?

  Dickens, Austen, Wharton, Faulkner. Among living people, Alice McDermott, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks. I also really like Theodore Dreiser and Ford Madox Ford and John Galsworthy. It’s sad, the excellent people who have fallen out of fashion. You always hope they’ll fall back in again.

  What are the best books you’ve read by women journalists?

  It would be impossible to answer that question at this moment without starting with Kate Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which is flawless. When I was on book tour last year I talked about it more than my own book. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family is one of the best books I’ve ever read about what it’s like to be poor in America. I never miss Laura Lippman’s novels. She was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. She still has a reporter’s eye. Last year Julia Keller, who was at the Chicago Tribune, published a mystery set in West Virginia called A Killing in the Hills. It made me want to read her next one.

  Who are your favorite women writing today?

  There are some women writing terrific novels that pass as crime fiction but transcend the genre. I buy a new Denise Mina, Tana French, or Kate Atkinson the moment it appears. Hilary Mantel is finally getting the genuflection she deserves. But there are some women whose backlists should be read by everyone. Mary Wesley should be much better known in the United States than she is.

  What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

  I think “experimental fiction” is a synonym for “Give me a break,” and I’ve never been able to warm to sci-fi. Other than that, I’m an omnivore.

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

  A pretty full set of Georgette Heyer. Which, by the way, no one should find surprising. Literary snobbery has it that Heyer wrote standard-issue bodice rippers, but the truth is, her Regency novels are well-crafted escapism, potato chips for the soul. If you liked Downton Abbey, you will love Georgette Heyer.

  Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

  I have many poetry collections—that’s my version of self-help. Yeats, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin. Most of my books have a poem as an epigram to guide me; the most recent one starts with “Late Fragment,” the poem Raymond Carver has on his headstone. Not enough people read poetry.

  What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

  One of the first copies of Heavy Metal and You, by Christopher Krovatin.

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  Oh, such a Miss America answer: the Bible. I grew up Catholic, and it’s hard to separate the New Testament from all my aspirations, inspiration, and political positions. I’m a liberal because of the Sermon on the Mount.

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

  The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. Smart people make bad decisions about policy and then compound them by refusing to admit they were wrong. I wish George W. Bush had read it before invading Iraq.

  Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?

  We had a family friend who owned hundreds of books and had them set up on shelves, library style, in her basement. She is the person who introduced me to A Girl of the Limberlost, Anne of Green Gables, and the Betsy-Tacy series. I used to go down those steps as though I was entering the US Mint.

  Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

  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 durin
g the Civil War. I even forgave her for not marrying Laurie.

  What books are on your coffee table?

  Stephen Sondheim’s two-volume memoir/writing primer/musical theater guide, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. I listen to Sondheim all the time while I’m writing.

  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?

  There are books you outgrow and shouldn’t revisit. Let them remain frozen in the amber of adolescence. The Catcher in the Rye seems genius when you’re fifteen, and when you’re thirty-five—not so much. I thought Ayn Rand was amazing when I was in high school, and now the only thing I find amazing is that I ever felt that way. As for the putting down part, I think I will pass. No less an eminence than Philip Roth has told us that writing is frustrating and humiliating. No one needs to be humiliated further by reading in the Times that someone chucked her book after three chapters.

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

  That way lies disaster. Books are writers’ way of becoming something else, something more, something greater. It might be that dinner with Dickens would be a disappointment. I’ve met some living writers who were just like their books, wonderfully, and others who ruined their books for me by being pompous and self-obsessed.

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

  Elizabeth Bennet. We would be buds for sure, power-walking the grounds of Pemberley. And I would get to hang out with Darcy.

  What do you plan to read next?

  There’s a new Kate Atkinson!

  Anna Quindlen is the author of novels and nonfiction works including A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Object Lessons, Still Life with Breadcrumbs, and One True Thing.

  Jonathan Franzen

  What’s the best book you read in the last year?

  I loved Rachel Kushner’s Flamethrowers. I also have to mention Mario Vargas Llosa’s War of the End of the World and Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

  The book creates the experience. If I’m loving something, I suddenly discover large chunks of reading time that I wasn’t aware of having. But I will say there’s nothing like being stuck in a middle seat on a long flight that begins with a two-hour delay. In a situation like that, a few years ago, I’d brought along a new novel that critics were wild about and that I was certain I would enjoy. It was so boring and dead that after fifty pages I just closed it and stared at the seat-back tray and suffered, resenting the author and psychoanalyzing the critics. Conversely, on an even worse pair of flights, from Zagreb to New York by way of two London airports, I’d carefully saved The Custom of the Country, and it kept me engrossed the entire way. I finished it in the taxi line at JFK, feeling bottomlessly grateful to Edith Wharton.

  What German authors are you currently reading?

  I’m reading the extremely funny Thomas Brussig, who unfortunately isn’t translated into English. Last year I was reading Karl Kraus for the translations of his work that I’m publishing in the fall. Kraus was Viennese, but his language, of course, was German.

  Are there particular kinds of stories you’re drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

  I like fiction by writers engaged in trying to make sense of their lives and of the world in which they find themselves, writers who palpably have skin in the game, and this makes me particularly resistant to historical fiction. And yet some of my all-time favorite novels are historical—The Greenlanders (Jane Smiley), The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald), and War and Peace. It took some perseverance to get into The War of the End of the World, which is about the brutal suppression of a rebellion in late-nineteenth-century Brazil, but once I was into it I was harrowed as I’ve been by few other novels. The suffering and violence and death in it became, in a sense, my own. I thought it was magnificent.

  Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

  I guess we shouldn’t count Freud, although I have felt helped by him. I also remember feeling helped, at least momentarily, by Harriet Lerner’s Dance of Anger at a dark moment in my early thirties. It’s the rare self-help book that acknowledges the true difficulty of helping the self.

  What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

  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.

  What’s the best thing about writing a book?

  The meaning it temporarily lends to my existence.

  The hardest or least enjoyable part?

  The years of doubting whether I actually have another story to tell.

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

  I wouldn’t presume to require our current president to read anything, but the Vargas Llosa novel wouldn’t have been a bad choice for our previous president, who I suspect could have used some help in imagining the human costs of righteous wars. Nor would The Flamethrowers—which, among other things, gives a subtly damning view of a powerful man through the eyes of the ambitious but pliable young woman he sleeps with—have been a bad choice for the president before that.

  Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?

  I grew up going to the public library every week and coming home with stacks of books—my parents weren’t readers, didn’t have time to be. But my father read books to me every weeknight evening he was home. My mother never read to me, even when he was away on business. I wonder if she recognized that reading was the primary private thing that he and I had together.

  Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

  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.

  What books are on your coffee table?

  I admit that I have a coffee table and that there are books on the lower tier of it. Books of bird photographs, catalogs of painters I like (Anne Neely, Lisa Sanditz), a book of photographs of exurban sprawl. I wish I could say that I’d ever seen a guest reach down and pick one up.

  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?

  Most books I pick up I put down without finishing, either because the writing is weak or feels false, or because I sense an absence of skin in the game. I picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being more or less to make sure that it was as overrated as I suspected. I’d always hated the title, and I was sore with Kundera for his public rejection of Dostoyevsky, many years ago. Kundera is a committed rationalist, which is generally a big handicap for a novelist, and it’s true that even the dreams in Unbearable are given rational readings. But they’re still great dreams, and the character who has them, Tereza, is rendered with gorgeous sympathy. I wouldn’t have guessed that a love story so well analyzed philosophically could be so moving in the end.

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

  I wish I could have been present when Kafka read The Metamorphosis aloud to his friends, who couldn’t stop laughing. The humor is still there in the text, but I would love to know what he did with his voice.

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

  One of Shakespeare’s comic heroines, probably Rosalind, althoug
h trying to talk to her in iambic pentameter would be a strain.

  What are you planning to read next?

  For the past twenty years or so I’ve been planning to read the final four volumes of In Search of Lost Time next.

  Jonathan Franzen is the author of Freedom and The Corrections, among other books.

  Hilary Mantel

  What’s the best book you read in the last year?

  The term “best” would have to stretch. There’s reading that’s important to me, in a personal way: I’ve been working my way through the books of the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of thinking over the content. “Best” as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson’s new novel, Life After Life, ingenious and furiously energetic: it’s exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game. There’s rereading, very important to me now. Last year I was commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, and it gave me a reason to sit down with it again. It’s a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I’ve pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)

  Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

  I’d like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder … my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I’d be fourteen, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.