By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Dan Savage is the author of It Gets Better, American Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah, and The Kid, among other books.

  Christopher Buckley

  What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

  According to the increasingly hazardous-looking ziggurat on my bedside table: Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet; David Nasaw’s biography of William Randolph Hearst, The Chief; Christopher Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man; Eric Jaffe’s The King’s Best Highway; Frank Langella’s memoir, Dropped Names; the Collected Stories of Roald Dahl; Ellin Stein’s history of the National Lampoon, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick; Hiram Maxim’s autobiography, My Life (he invented the Maxim gun in the 1880s, providing Hilaire Belloc with the couplet “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not”); Edna O’Brien’s memoir, Country Girl; John Keegan’s biography of Churchill, titled, oddly, Winston Churchill; Bill Bryson’s biography of Shakespeare, also oddly titled Shakespeare; and George H. W. Bush’s collection of letters, All the Best.

  Whether this reflects catholicity or ADD, I can’t say. Probably ADD. What was your question? I can say for certain that since there are 1,926 pages in The Raj Quartet, I will still be reading it in the year 2039.

  What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

  I’m a Libra, so I claim astrological right of indecision as between Edmund Morris’s This Living Hand and Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Both are exquisitely written. Edmund Morris is of course chiefly known for his Theodore Roosevelt trilogy biography; its first volume won the Pulitzer Prize. This collection of essays and articles is a calliope of talent and range. Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her mother’s growing up in Kenya is breathtakingly tragic, triumphant, and lyrical. It only just occurred to me now that both authors grew up in Africa.

  If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?

  Evelyn Waugh, hands down, even though he so despised Americans that, if he were alive to hear this compliment, he would swat it back across the net with serene contempt.

  Runner-up favorite: God, assuming he actually did channel that greatest of all novels, branded under the title the Bible.

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

  Drawn to: stories that begin with lines like, “Late in October 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana, to Calgary in Alberta to enlist in the Great War.” (Jim Harrison’s novella, Legends of the Fall.)

  Steer clear of: stories that begin with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I know, I know. My bad.)

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

  H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices. He wrote these six volumes in the 1920s, but their zest, sinew, and cut-and-thrust are undated, fresh, and vital nearly a century after their ink dried. No American writer—except perhaps Twain and Bierce—could be so withering and gleeful at the same time. But see Favorite Book on Politics, below.

  What’s the best book on politics you’ve ever read? The worst?

  Filial duty—and genuine admiration—incline me to say The Unmaking of a Mayor, by William F. Buckley Jr., his account of running for mayor of New York City in 1965. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t win.) Joe Klein, who wrote, among other marvelous books, Primary Colors, told Unmaking’s author that it was his favorite book on politics. Coming from Klein, this is high praise.

  But to answer your question: Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O’Rourke, his definitive and herniatingly funny account of that menagerie known as the United States Congress and zoo known as Washington, DC. It makes you thank God that the founding fathers are no longer around to see what we’ve done with the gift they bequeathed us.

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

  Title 26 of the United States Code, otherwise known as the Internal Revenue Code. No one seems to know exactly how long it is, which says something in itself. I like President Obama, but if he actually sat down and read this cetacean abomination, he might think twice before adding more pages to it.

  Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?

  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.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

  I should come clean and say Remembrance of Things Past, but that would brand me as a philistine, and we don’t want that. So instead: much as it pains me to say it, The Autobiography of Mark Twain. I continue to revere him, but this omnium-gatherum is truly and monumentally dull and dare I say, pointless. As Garrison Keillor remarked in these pages in his review: it’s the ultimate argument for burning your leftovers before you die.

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

  Meeting one’s heroes in the flesh can be very depressing and disillusioning, but to divide candidates into categories:

  Party Animals: François Villon, Rabelais, Byron, Kenneth Tynan, Casanova, James Dickey. (I met Dickey, but that’s another story.)

  Wow Factor: Shakespeare, but only if he was really as cool as Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love.

  Wrestler with God: Melville, but sooo gloomy.

  Wit on Loan from God: Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker.

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

  Ian Fleming’s masterpiece creation, so that when asked my name, I could respond with a reasonably straight face: “Bond. James Bond.” I say it all the time, but women do not swoon and men just laugh.

  Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?

  The correct answer is “The next one.” But in fact, Steaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter. That was fifteen books ago now; there’s something about your firstborn.

  What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?

  War and Peace. My standard excuse for this appalling illiteracy is: “I’m saving it for my final illness.” But when the doctors tell me I have six months to live, I wonder: Will I really reach for War and Peace instead of P. G. Wodehouse? Fortunately, it’s irrelevant, because even if I’m ninety-four, I’ll still be plowing my way through The Raj Quartet.

  What will you read next?

  Marie Arana’s biography Bolívar. She is an enchanting and fascinating writer and will make me feel better about not having read War and Peace.

  Christopher Buckley is the author of Thank You for Smoking, Losing Mum and Pup, and But Enough About You, among other books.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  What kinds of books do you like to read during the summer? Any favorite summertime recommendations?

  A couple summers ago, I read Father of the Rain, by Lily King, a novel that starts out during the summer of Nixon’s resignation. This isn’t exactly a romp in the sand—it’s about a daughter and her cruel, charismatic alcoholic father—but it’s very well written and absorbing.

  Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?

  I started graduate school at Iowa in the fall of 1999, on my twenty-fourth birthday, and in my first workshop there was only one other woman. Her name was Susanna Daniel, and we quickly became close friends—she was fun to gossip with, and she could write amazing sentences. Susanna’s second novel, Sea Creatures, is out this month, and it’s an intelligent page-turner (that is, the dream combination) about, among other things, South Florida, art, insomnia, and marriage.

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

  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. (I also am wary of fiction about writers, but again I guess more in theory than in practice.)

  Do you like to read memoirs?

  I’m currently in the middle of Are You My Mother? by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It’s much more meta and nonlinear than I had expected, and totally engrossing. I want to discuss it with someone who knows more about psychology than I do.

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

  I’m fascinated by books about time management and decluttering, which is akin to a person who weighs seven hundred pounds being fascinated by diet books. But the book I’ve truly been helped the most by is actually a parenting book called Sleeping Through the Night: How Infants, Toddlers, and Their Parents Can Get a Good Night’s Sleep. It’s by Jodi Mindell, a sleep researcher and psychology professor who’s also a mom, and I swear by this book. It’s clear, realistic, and neither excessively harsh nor ineffectively gentle.

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

  I’m not currently teaching, but it’s a wonderful feeling when a former student gets a book published and sends me a copy. This happened last year with a woman named Bianca Zander, whose terrific first novel is called The Girl Below. It’s about a young woman who returns to London after a decade in New Zealand and confronts strange events from her past.

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  Far from the Tree, which I finished recently, is the most amazing book I’ve ever read—in fact, I continue to talk about it so much that my husband suggested I get a Far from the Tree tattoo. The book is about children whose identities greatly differ from those of their parents for various reasons—deafness, autism, transgenderism—and it’s also about how we as a society define disability and react to differences. Andrew Solomon is very compassionate but also very honest; for some families, their challenges cause them to tap reservoirs of strength and patience they didn’t know they had, and for others, the challenges ruin their lives. I came away with huge admiration for many of the parents and kids and for Solomon himself; he’s so smart and sympathetic, and he left no stone unturned in terms of reporting and researching. The book is definitely not just for parents, by the way, and it’s not a how-to on child-rearing; some of the “children” featured are now adults looking back. It’s really a book for everyone.

  I will, however, offer a word of warning: It’s seven hundred pages not counting footnotes, and it took me months to finish (I don’t have an e-reader, and the print version is too big to comfortably carry on planes or even read in bed). My sister once texted me asking, “How far from the tree are you?” This would be a great book club pick and lead to really interesting conversations, but I’d recommend breaking it into three chunks to discuss at three meetings. Because of how the chapters are divided, this would be easy to do.

  Any idea whether Laura Bush read your first-lady fictionalization, American Wife?

  When asked in an interview, she said she hadn’t, and I trust that this is true. People have said to me, “Of course she read it—she’s an avid reader, and it’s about her!” But I suspect that having been in the public eye for so long, and being part of a family that has received so much exposure, she’s developed mechanisms for ignoring certain kinds of attention. If I were her, I definitely wouldn’t read it, and if I did read it, I wouldn’t like it, even though the character based on her is positive. I believe I had legitimate reasons for writing the book, but I understand why novels based on real people, especially living people, make some readers queasy.

  Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

  I’ve always strongly identified with Toad from Frog and Toad. Especially in the story in which he won’t get out of the river because he doesn’t want anyone to see him looking funny in his bathing suit—and thereby attracts the attention of the nearby lizards, dragonflies, field mouse, etc.—he’s so completely the ridiculous instigator of his own problems.

  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?

  I find The Little Engine That Could almost unreadable—repetitive, wordy, heavy-handed—though I live with two children who don’t share my opinion.

  What do you plan to read next?

  Months ago, I heard a writer named Attica Locke interviewed on NPR about her novel The Cutting Season—a murder mystery set on a former slave plantation turned tourist attraction. I was very intrigued.

  Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, Sisterland, and American Wife.

  * * *

  Laugh-Out-Loud Funny

  Without Feathers, by Woody Allen, makes me giggle like a baby. Holidays on Ice, by David Sedaris. How to Have a Life-Style, by Quentin Crisp.

  —Lena Dunham

  In Wells Tower’s first collection of short stories, there is a description of a mouse emerging from behind a fridge eating a coupon which made me laugh for a good ten days.

  —Emma Thompson

  The last book that made me laugh? K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City. I’m a sucker for lines like “He had numerous stories of recent adventure and suffering—specifically, his adventures and other people’s suffering, almost invariably connected—that he told with the air of an amiable ghoul.”

  —Junot Díaz

  The Diaries of Auberon Waugh. It’s in my bathroom, and it’s always good for a giggle.

  —J. K. Rowling

  The series of Don Camillo stories, by the modern Italian author Giovanni Guareschi, collected in three volumes. The stories are set in a small Italian town and involve three protagonists: the local priest Don Camillo; the mayor Peppone; and the church’s Christ statue, which Don Camillo consults regularly for advice and which answers. Don Camillo and Peppone clash constantly in words and occasionally with their fists. But the two of them are joined by a common sense of humanity. The Don Camillo stories range from gut-wrenchingly tragic to hilarious. Whenever I start the next story in Guareschi’s collection, I never know in advance whether it will make me cry or laugh.

  —Jared Diamond

  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.

  —Katherine Boo

  I love humor and for this reason I’ve always enjoyed Mark Twain. He was without a doubt the funniest writer who ever picked up a pen.

  —John Grisham

  St. Aubyn takes the prize. I don’t think I would be able to define a work of literature as great if it didn’t make me laugh at least a little.

  —Michael Chabon

  Houellebecq and St. Aubyn are both making me laugh, but the St. Aubyn is more intentionally funny. And Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22. There’s a line in there that goes something like, “By that time, my looks had declined to such a degree that only women would go to bed with me.”

  —Jeffrey Eugenides

  Jennifer Finney Boylan’s endlessly witty Stuck in the Middle with You made me laugh out loud over and over again; it’s about her experience as a transgender parent, who started off as her children’s father and ended up as their “Maddy”—not quite a mom, but definitely no longer a dad.

  —Andrew Solomon

  I’ve been reading a nonfiction cartoon called Couch Fiction, by a British psychoanalyst, Philippa Perry. The book is si
mply 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.

  —Alain de Botton

  * * *

  James McBride

  What are you reading at the moment?

  You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier.

  Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

  More or less. Though at times, I will gobble anything within range.

  What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. All 1,100 pages, and I wish there were more. Just finished it. I should’ve read it years ago.

  If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?

  Toni Morrison. Morrison is like John Coltrane. She can play anything. She plays off the horn, like Coltrane did. She busts through the form. Coltrane’s music demanded listening. Morrison’s work is the same. It simply demands attention. There is no living author like her.

  Care to call out your nominees for most overlooked or underappreciated writer?

  That’s a long list. At the top would have to be Paul Monette, author of Becoming a Man. He was a superbly gifted writer who died during the AIDS epidemic that deprived us of a generation of talent. I’ve often thought to myself, if they took the graphic sex scenes out of that book, it could be required reading in public schools. But maybe I’m dreaming. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; and the British writer John Wyndham (The Chrysalids), whose deep imagination and challenge to religious zealotry should serve as a template for any young sci-fi writer. The Chrysalids is a children’s book, by the way.