By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  The obvious, and true, answer is Darwin’s Origin, but I didn’t read the book itself until after its message had changed my life by secondary routes. So I’ll go, less obviously, for a work of science fiction, Fred Hoyle’s Black Cloud. In many ways a deplorable book (the hero, with whom we are supposed to identify, is obnoxious, aggressively rude, sexist, and a terrible role model for scientists), I nevertheless learned more science from it, at a formative age, than one ever expects from a work of fiction. It was The Black Cloud that first pumped my intuition about information theory and the idea of the arbitrariness of the medium by which information is apprehended. I understood, too, the potential difficulty of separating out individuals from the group in which they are embedded. Is a beehive a colony or a superorganism? If human brains were joined telepathically by high-speed data transmission links, would we become one massive individual? The plot engagingly illustrates the way in which discoveries are simultaneously made more than once in radically different ways. But above all the novel bequeathed to me the haunting idea of “the Deep Problems” of existence and origins, questions which the human mind was never evolved to understand.

  What books would you recommend to an aspiring scientist?

  Both Peter Medawar and James Watson have written books on this. Called, respectively, Advice to a Young Scientist and Avoid Boring People, these are not their authors’ best books, but they offer memorable hints for success in the vocation of science. Watson, in particular, has a list of quirky imperatives such as “Don’t take up golf”; “Work on Sundays”; “Hire spunky lab helpers”; and “Avoid being photographed.”

  In general, what kinds of stories are you drawn to?

  I’m not an aficionado of science fiction, but I’ve already appreciated a novel that pumps scientific intuition. Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, too, exemplify that kind of good science fiction, unlike slack-jawed fantasy where the writer dreams heedlessly away without respecting the decent constraints of science. Another first-class example of the right sort of science fiction is Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe. Here the intuition being pumped concerns mythology and the origins of religion. A people who, for reasons that emerge, lost light at some remote part of their history and now live in perpetual darkness, retain “light” in their language but only in mythic allusions to a lost paradise from which they have fallen. They worship things like “Great Light Almighty,” “Oh, thank Light,” “For Light’s sake!,” and their pantheon includes demonic figures who engineered the fall from Light’s grace. The demons are called Strontium, Cobalt, and the arch-devil Hydrogen Himself. Go figure, as Americans say.

  I also enjoy social satire of the Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Kingsley Amis, Michael Frayn kind. Witty observation of the way people are and the way they talk, the sort of sharply penetrating perceptiveness that makes me want to run into the street and hug somebody with sheer delight.

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

  Depending on how naïvely literalistic you are, you might be surprised to find the Bible. The King James Version, of course, and not so much on my shelves as continually off my shelves, because I open it so often: sometimes to quote it, sometimes for sheer literary pleasure—especially Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

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

  I’d take the following two books, hand one to each of them, then ask them to swap books so they end up reading both: Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World is the best antidote I know to superstition and pseudoscience. Not that either Obama or Cameron are superstitious or supernaturalists, but they need to develop a less obsequious attitude to their constituents who are. Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation is salutary for anybody involved in settling disputes and trying to foster cooperation. Indeed I wrote in my foreword to the revised edition: “The world’s leaders should all be locked up with this book and not released until they have read it. This would be a pleasure to them and might save the rest of us. The Evolution of Cooperation deserves to replace the Gideon Bible.”

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

  Pride and Prejudice. It must be my prejudice, and I am not proud of it, but I can’t get excited about who is going to marry whom, and how rich they are.

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

  Sorry to be boringly predictable, but Shakespeare. Who are you? And how did a humble country boy like you become the greatest genius, and part creator, of our beloved English language? Might you have been even better if you’d studied at Oxford or Cambridge?

  What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed not to have read?

  Ah yes, David Lodge’s Humiliation game. I’d be champion at that. There are so many, but I’ll say War and Peace.

  What do you plan to read next?

  War and Peace. Oh dear, I set myself up for that, didn’t I?

  Richard Dawkins is the author of many books, including The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and An Appetite for Wonder.

  * * *

  Most Overrated

  In seventh grade, for some perverse reason, I decided to read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. I got about fifty pages into the first volume before moss started growing on my eyelids.

  —Carl Hiaasen

  Everything by Ernest Hemingway.

  —John Irving

  Most contemporary political memoirs, including mine, My American Journey.

  —Colin Powell

  I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated. My first attempt at reading, for instance, D. H. Lawrence was a disappointment—I wasn’t old enough, or mature enough, quite yet; now,Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, whom I’ve taught in my university courses many times. Another initial disappointment was Walt Whitman, whom I’d also read too young (I know, it’s unbelievable, how could anyone admit to have been “disappointed” in Walt Whitman? Please don’t send contemptuous e-mails).

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  Finnegans Wake. Can’t finish it. Just can’t. It was required reading in one of my college classes, and I’m a pretty good crammer, so I’d planned on pulling an all-nighter, but I couldn’t get past page twenty. I attributed it to lack of sleep and have tried several times since then—but fully awake, I couldn’t get past page ten. If that makes me lowbrow, so be it.

  —Jeanette Walls

  I don’t enjoy Jonathan Franzen, although I mean to. I couldn’t finish The Corrections and thought Freedom was hilariously overrated. Maybe I am just bitter because it was such a gigantic success. I couldn’t read The Shipping News, but I pretended to love it because we had the same agent when it came out. It drove me crazy, but I later forgave the author everything for those later great, life-changing short stories.

  —Anne Lamott

  I’m not a big fan of the Twilight series. I can’t get past the premise, which is that a group of wealthy, sophisticated, educated, highly intelligent, centuries-old vampires, who can do pretty much whatever they want, have chosen to be … high school students. I simply cannot picture such beings sitting in a classroom listening to a geometry teacher drone on about the cosine. I have more respect for vampires than that.

  —Dave Barry

  Sometimes I put books down that are good but that I see too well what the author is up to. As you practice your craft, you lose your innocence as a reader. That’s the one sad thing about this work.

  —E. L. Doctorow

  * * *

  Sting

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

  I enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, almost as much as I enjoyed its predecessor, W
olf Hall. Her portrait of Thomas Cromwell is complex and largely sympathetic to a character that is usually cast darkly and exclusively as Henry VIII’s “muscle.” I enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s treatment of the American War of Independence in Bunker Hill for similar reasons, a well-researched story proving to be more nuanced and compelling than a well-established myth.

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

  Mark Twain, for the perfect combination of plot and character in Huckleberry Finn.

  What kinds of stories are you drawn to?

  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.

  We have to ask about Nabokov. How does it feel to have turned on a generation of junior high schoolgirls to Lolita? Are you a Nabokov fan?

  Is that true—that my appalling rhyme led a mass migration to the linguistic cosmos of Nabokov? I don’t think so, but then, they could have gone to worse places.

  In what ways do the books you read figure into the music you write?

  Songwriting is of course a very different art to that of the novelist—condensing sometimes large ideas into rhyming couplets seems to be the opposite process.

  But it is interesting to me how often a novel will begin with a quote from a poem or a song, so the territories do overlap to some extent. My favorite songs are narrative songs, short stories that can be recounted in three minutes. My favorite novels are extended songs. What is One Hundred Years of Solitude if not an opera? And a grand one at that!

  You’ve written a memoir, Broken Music. What was that experience like for you—the writing itself, and the publication and reception of the book?

  I began to realize while writing and remembering that memory is a neural muscle, and once you begin to stretch it, it grows to accommodate everything that has ever happened to you, often things you might prefer to forget. But the abiding emotions that sustained me through the process were gratitude and forgiveness; to use the newly developed muscle otherwise is largely a waste of time. I think people were surprised that I wrote almost exclusively about my early life, before the distorting lens of fame and success, and the well-worn clichés of celebrity.

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

  The complete works of P. G. Wodehouse, for their innocent escapism.

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

  A self-help book? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  Probably Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a delicious and disruptive satire of Soviet Russia. I hear a dead man was put on trial in Moscow only this past summer; Woland would have loved it!

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

  Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius—Stoicism and the limitations of power. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”

  Did you grow up with a lot of books?

  We only had two in the house, an illustrated Old Testament and volume one of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was well versed in everything from “aardvark” to “azimuth,” but little else. The public library became a sort of refuge. I never throw a book away now. I have kept every dog-eared paperback I have ever read. Books are the only things I’m acquisitive about. And no, I don’t lend my books … join the library!

  Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

  I imagined myself as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, an innocent among thieves and cutthroats. It must have been the first book I ever read from start to finish, with unforgettable characters, Long John Silver, Blind Pew, Ben Gunn … The Black Spot still terrifies me.

  What books are on your coffee table?

  Albert Camus: Solitude and Solidarity, a beautiful and evocative portrait of the man and the writer, edited by his daughter Catherine, and Ellen von Unwerth’s Fräulein … Well, what did you expect?

  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’m no critic. It’s hard enough writing a book without some opinionated parvenu dismissing your work because he wasn’t in the mood or is too daft to catch your drift. Mind you, anything with the word “Code” in the title, I will avoid like the plague!

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

  I’d like to ask Shakespeare if he composed while walking, or was he entirely sedentary?

  What do you plan to read next?

  I’m weighing My Lunches with Orson against Daniel C. Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

  Any plans to write another book?

  Oh yes! I definitely want to give it another crack!

  Sting is an award-winning singer, songwriter, and human rights activist. He is the author of Broken Music: A Memoir.

  * * *

  Reading Through Tears

  The last book that made me cry? That’s easy: the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Eduardo Corral’s collection, Slow Lightning. When I finished that book I bawled. Wise and immense, but peep for yourself: “Once a man offered me his heart and I said no. Not because I didn’t love him. Not because he was a beast or white—I couldn’t love him. Do you understand? In bed while we slept, our bodies inches apart, the dark between our flesh a wick. It was burning down. And he couldn’t feel it.”

  —Junot Díaz

  That is a very rare occurrence. I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov’s description, in Speak, Memory, of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

  —Michael Chabon

  My own book Canada made me cry the last time I read it. If it was any good, it should’ve. Beyond that, the very last book that made me cry was more than one poem in James Wright’s collected poems, Above the River.

  —Richard Ford

  The honest answer is The Casual Vacancy. I bawled while writing the ending, while rereading it, and when editing it.

  —J. K. Rowling

  The South Beach Diet.

  —Jeffrey Eugenides

  I was on holiday years ago with Corelli’s Mandolin. Rendered inconsolable and had to be put to bed for the afternoon.

  —Emma Thompson

  I don’t want to read any book that makes me cry. I get all the gloom I can stand from newspaper headlines.

  —Carl Hiaasen

  I’m not sure I ever cried while reading a book.

  —John Grisham

  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.

  —Katherine Boo

  I read Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert O. Hirschman early this year and was deeply moved by it. I finished that book with tears in my eyes.

  —Malcolm Gladwell

  I cried reading Mary Berg’s diary of hunger in the ghetto in Warsaw. More recently and trivially, I cried when I read through my own book of essays and realized: thank God, it’s done.

  —Nicholson Baker

  I’m always close to tears reading Judith Kerr’s delightful children’s story, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. It tells of a tiger who turns up
, quite unexpectedly, at teatime at the house of a girl called Sophie and her mother. You’d expect them to panic, but they take the appearance of this visitor entirely in their stride—and their reaction is a subtle invitation for us to approach life’s unexpected challenges with resilience and good humor.

  —Alain de Botton

  * * *

  Andrew Solomon

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

  I’m rereading The Portrait of a Lady, which I do every few years to remind myself that there really is such a thing as elegance, in life and in prose—and to remember how much devastation can unfold around it. I am moved by Henry James’s ineffable sadness, the belief that human experience is full of loss and that high morals don’t stand a chance. I don’t entirely agree with that point of view, but I find it galvanizing. I’ve also read a good bit of William James for research recently. I tend not to think that brevity is the soul of wit, and neither do the James brothers, so reading them in sequence makes me feel like a houseguest at a very congenial house.

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

  Christian Caryl’s Strange Rebels argues convincingly that the problems of the twenty-first century were all hatched in 1979, and looks particularly at the move away from secularism and the welfare state; it’s a bold and illuminating take on our time, and its analysis of militancy seems particularly relevant as we look to Syria. On a lighter note, I loved Cécile David-Weill’s Suitors, a charming comedy of manners set at a country estate in the South of France, apparently one of the few places in the world where anyone still has enough manners to make a comedy about.

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

  I have a soft spot for George Eliot. She achieves scope without ever sacrificing her devastating precision. Her psychological insight accumulates through perfectly observed details, without a trace of pomposity. The way she assembles multiple portraits is one of my great inspirations as I try to construct my own nonfiction. Virginia Woolf is my other favorite. I feel as if she is writing not simply about the mind, but about my mind. Her books are as visceral to me as music. I find that Woolf, like chocolate, requires rationing; I could easily become emotionally obese if I let myself consume her work too often.