by Pamela Paul
I’m not sure that any novels (or comic books) had an impact on me as far as me becoming a writer. I love many novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude is beautiful, as is L’Assommoir, by Émile Zola. Cotton Comes to Harlem is a dazzling book, and when I was very young Winnie-the-Pooh enchanted me.
My father once told me, when I was a child, that he had written, when he was young, a cowboy story. He sent this story to a Chicago publisher, who never responded. But a year later he saw that story, attributed to a different author, in a magazine that the same company published. He told me that he learned from this experience that he could never be a writer, at least not a published one. This was a tragic story that burrowed down into my subconscious mind. If anything, it is this story that most influenced me becoming a writer.
What does your personal book collection look like?
I am proud to say that I give away or sell at little to no profit almost all of my books. I have mentioned a few favorites earlier, but as a rule I don’t believe in keeping books. After I have read, reread, and reread a book it seems sinful to keep such a reservoir of fun and knowledge fallow on a shelf. Books are meant to be read, and if I’m not reading them then someone else should get the opportunity.
What writer would you like to meet?
I mentioned him earlier—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. Meeting Homer on some Attic beach, next to an open fire, accompanied by whatever servant or wife helped him move from town to town, sounds like the ideal novelist’s vacation.
What do you plan to read next?
I’ve been thinking that it’s time to reread The Autumn of the Patriarch.
Walter Mosley is the author of many books, including the Easy Rawlins mysteries series, which started with Devil in a Blue Dress.
* * *
Childhood Reading (Continued)
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.
—Caroline Kennedy
I remember once going to a neighbor’s house and they had a TV tuned to a show called Lost in Space. I watched it and then ran home as fast as I could to tell my mother all about it, but she stopped me soon after I started, saying that the show was simple-minded claptrap. If I was really interested in science fiction, she said, she had a treat for me. Then she pulled out a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories and started reading them. Even then, I had to admit that the writing was actually superior to the Lost in Space episode I’d just seen, but at the time I didn’t realize how lucky I was.
—Jeannette Walls
My sister and I made weekly trips to the Exeter Public Library and returned carrying armloads of our favorites—Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, Curious George, Madeline, and Babar. As we got older, I remember my parents reading to us every night—Make Way for Ducklings, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice, which I preferred to his entirely terrifying Where the Wild Things Are (the notion of a child’s bedroom transforming into a monster-infested jungle made it impossible to sleep).
—Dan Brown
Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory, because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than seven.
—Scott Turow
Grimms’ fairy tales. My favorite was “The Bremen Town Musicians,” about a dog, cat, donkey, and rooster, all over the hill, who learn that they are about to be discarded or worse. They decide to take matters into their own hands. I made my mother and grandmother read it to me so often that I could recite the whole story word for word.
—Sylvia Nasar
I didn’t read the canon of classic children’s books, at least not until I became a father and read to my own children. No doubt this was because my parents were new to the country and not comfortable speaking English and didn’t read to me at night. I didn’t speak English myself until the first grade. I read lots of books in elementary school—I remember winning a prize for reading the most books one year—but I can’t recall a single title.
—Chang-rae Lee
When I was five, I read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese, by Selma Lagerlof. It was so inspiring I wrote my own version called Lenin and His Magical Goose, a hundred-page tome about Lenin encountering a socialist goose and conquering Finland together. It was commissioned by my grandmother, who paid for each page with a block of Soviet cheese. Even today, Random House pays me in cheese.
—Gary Shteyngart
Supposedly I went into my room with Alice in Wonderland, which was given to me when I was five, and didn’t come out until I was done. I was an early reader but I don’t think that says much. Having a child and being around them, it’s apparent to me that there’s some kind of clock that goes off at different times for different kids. Mine went off early, and I didn’t like to sleep. So my mother let me stay up as late as I wanted looking at books, and she says I stayed up all night doing that starting at age three. My best years are way behind me.
—Rachel Kushner
* * *
Khaled Hosseini
What’s your favorite book of all time?
The collected Poems of Hafez, also called Divan-e-Hafez. Revered in the Persian-speaking world, Hafez is, for me, the supreme Persian poet. His verses of philosophy, mystical love, and bold anti-establishment statements are filled with luxuriant images and magical rhythms that always enchant me. His heartfelt ghazals have never failed to move me, and still do today as they did when I read them as a schoolboy.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime. I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.
Who are your favorite novelists?
J. M. Coetzee, Jennifer Egan, Hemingway, Elizabeth Strout, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dave Eggers, Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro (I know, she writes short stories, but many of them have the arc of condensed novels).
What books would you recommend about Afghanistan?
West of Kabul, East of New York, by Tamim Ansary; Opium Nation, by Fariba Nawa; The Punishment of Virtue, by Sarah Chayes; The Sewing Circles of Herat, by Christina Lamb; The Patience Stone, by Atiq Rahimi; The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart; An Unexpected Light, by Jason Elliot.
You practiced medicine for more than ten years. What has your training and experience as a doctor brought to your work as a writer?
Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.
Qualities you need to be a novelist: Ditto.
Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?
I don’t think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliché now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
I love just about any kind of story as long as it is well told, makes an emotional impact, and holds an elusive sense of mystery. That said, it has been many years since I’ve read fantasy or science fiction.
What boo
ks might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
A collection of Tintin comics. Why Do Men Have Nipples? World War Z. I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You. This last book comes, needless to say, with a recipe for a White Russian and is indispensable for fans of the cult classic. But that’s just like my opinion, man.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
My father gave me a Farsi translation of White Fang when I was a boy in Kabul circa mid-1970s.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
It has been years since I last read it, but the first time I did, in high school, The Grapes of Wrath really registered with me. Something about the struggles of the desperate migrant workers reminded me of the struggling people in my homeland of Afghanistan. When I visit Afghanistan now and meet displaced families moving from region to region on foot, trying to find work, home, a place to settle, I still think of Steinbeck’s masterpiece. And the final scene, Rose of Sharon breast-feeding the stranger, is one that still moves me deeply.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
I think this particular president is already a well-read man, thank God, and needs no reading recs from me.
Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?
I grew up around a lot of Rumi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyám books. My parents in Kabul had all the volumes around the house. No one ever really read to me as a child. I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?
The tragic Sohrab, the great warrior from Ferdowsi’s eleventh-century Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), one of the crown jewels of classic Persian poetry. Sohrab is the son of the great warrior Rostam, though the two have never met. Sohrab sets out with an army to bring glory to his father and win him the crown, only to come face-to-face with him in battle. The last scene of that particular story, Rostam holding Sohrab’s dying body, moments after he has learned the true identity of the man he has mortally wounded with his own sword, is unparalleled in the emotional wallop it packs.
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?
A number of them, of course. But I am a nice guy. Ah, let’s call it what it is: I’m a coward. OK, I’ll say it: The Catcher in the Rye. There.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?
I would download a video of a typical debate of creationism versus evolution in public education, and then I would time-travel to the nineteenth century and play the clip for Charles Darwin. Show him what he started. And then I would watch for his reaction.
If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?
Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen.
What do you plan to read next?
Maya’s Notebook, by Isabel Allende.
Khaled Hosseini is the author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed.
* * *
Favorite Characters and Literary Heroes
Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye) got me out of bed, Richard Wright (Black Boy) got me to school on the bus, but Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) helped me sleep at night.
—James McBride
Jane Eyre remains a favorite. Her truthfulness sometimes made me laugh. And her loneliness and need to make her own way mirrored my feelings.
—Amy Tan
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, of course. Sebastian Flyte. I suffered under the misapprehension that I was an Old World aristocrat manqué, rather than a middle-class, striving, and slightly affected New Yorker descended from peasants.
—Andrew Solomon
For years I admired Morris West from afar. Then I met him briefly at a cocktail party. His agent, a personal friend of mine, called the next morning: “Mary, where did you go? After the cocktails, Morris said, ‘Let’s collect Mary Clark and go to dinner.’” I wanted to kill myself. I had slipped away to a teacher’s retirement dinner.
—Mary Higgins Clark
John Updike’s Harry Angstrom, a.k.a. Rabbit, who gropes toward personal grace through four novels only to whiff in the end. After I finished Rabbit at Rest, I wrote Updike a fan letter telling him that I didn’t understand how he found the strength to get up every day to write a book so sad, especially about a character whom Updike knew and revealed with such amazing intimacy. It was like sending a dear friend to the gallows. But Updike’s intricate rendering of Rabbit over the course of thirty years is a profound achievement.
—Scott Turow
I tend to like the complicated antihero: Charlus, from Proust. Balzac’s Vautrin. Bolaño’s Hans Reiter/Archimboldi, in 2666. Shrike, from Miss Lonelyhearts. The Judge from Blood Meridian. Recktall Brown from The Recognitions. If I could write a character like one of those? Well. I should be so lucky.
—Rachel Kushner
* * *
Jeannette Walls
What’s your favorite book of all time?
The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene. It’s such a beautiful story of the triumph of compassion over cynicism.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I travel a lot, and having a good book on airplanes and in airports transforms tedium into treasured time. The other day, I was stuck at O’Hare for eight hours, but I had a pre-publication copy of a riveting memoir, A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout, about being kidnapped in Somalia. A few of the other travelers were having loud hissy fits, complaining that we were being treated horribly, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from shouting out: “We got food and clean water! You all don’t know how good we have it!”
Who are your favorite novelists?
Updike, Steinbeck, Balzac, and Mona Simpson.
Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?
I feel a little uncomfortable answering this, because the author I’d choose is quite happy with his level of recognition. Who am I to say he should be more famous?
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
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?
Do you read a lot of memoirs? Any good ones recently, aside from Lindhout’s?
I love memoirs. I devour them. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, by Neil White; The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartok; Denial, by Jessica Stern; A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah; An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison; Chanel Bonfire, by Wendy Lawless; The Center Cannot Hold, by Elyn Saks; After Visiting Friends, by Michael Hainey; The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison; My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor; Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution, edited by Wally Lamb. That’s just a few. There are so many more.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
My vast collection of books on raising chickens. There’s more to it than you’d think.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
The best self-help books, in my opinion, are memoirs. If people are honest about what happened to them, those stories are astonishing gifts to those of us grappling with—or just trying to understand—similar situations. I give away my memoirs like aspirins to friends who are going through tough times. Sometimes, it’s easier to have perspective on someone else’s life than your own.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
Peter the Great, by Robert Massie. It kicked off my obsession with Russian history.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it when I was ten years old and an o
utcast. Finding a “friend” like little Francie Nolan, who also was not very popular but also loved reading and her no-’count drunken dad, was a real revelation. I think it was the first time I experienced the incredible power of books.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
President Obama is a lot smarter than I am. I’m trying to keep up with his reading list.
Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?
I was surrounded by books. There were times when art supplies and books were practically the only things in our house! We almost never had a television, but we always made regular pilgrimages to the library and came home with pillowcases filled with books. Sometimes, we even returned those books. I remember once going to a neighbor’s house and they had a TV tuned to a show called Lost in Space. I thought it was wondrous. I watched it and then ran home as fast as I could to tell my mother all about it, but she stopped me soon after I started, saying that the show was simple-minded claptrap. If I was really interested in science fiction, she said, she had a treat for me. Then she pulled out a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories and started reading them. Even then, I had to admit that the writing was actually superior to the Lost in Space episode I’d just seen, but at the time I didn’t realize how lucky I was.
Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?
Horton. He’s the one who heard a Who and hatched an egg. I was a big Dr. Seuss fan when I was very young—I had The Sneetches and Horton Hatches the Egg memorized before I started kindergarten, and much to the dismay of my friends, I can still recite big chunks of them.