by Pamela Paul
What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures? Do you like to read other legal thrillers?
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.
What’s the best book about the law ever written?
A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls. It’s not beach reading, but I don’t know of a more lucid articulation of the intuitions many of us share about what is just. Among works of fiction, Melville’s Billy Budd would be my first choice, especially in the present day, when the sexual undertones that once dared not speak their name are so apparent.
And the best book about Chicago?
Although the eponymous protagonist of Saul Bellow’s Herzog wanders through many locales, the extended sections of the novel set in Chicago are remarkable for their vividness, humor, and idiosyncratic insights. All of Bellow’s writing about Chicago was accomplished with such energy that you have to wonder if he had his finger in an electric socket.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
Probably The Count of Monte Cristo, which I read at age ten. Its account of prison escape, sword-fighting, and long-nurtured revenge transported me, and somehow inspired the thought that if it was this exciting to read a book, then it had to be even more thrilling to write one, to live the experience for years instead of days, and to feel the whole adventure come to life within you. Such is the wisdom you get from ten-year-olds. But now and then, there are days when it turns out he had it right.
Who are the writers you most admire?
Living? Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy lead by a thimble’s width in a very close race. Le Carré and Ruth Rendell are the writers of suspense I most cherish. And among those no longer walking among us, I prize Tolstoy, Dickens, Bellow, Graham Greene, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and everybody’s all-star, Shakespeare.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The Book Review actually posed the same question to me before President Obama took office, and I find, demonstrating Hobbes’s eternal wisdom about consistency, that my answer would no longer be the same. In 2008, I recommended a book about the Vasa, the seventeenth-century Swedish warship that sank on its maiden voyage, killing more than one hundred sailors, because no one dared tell the king the boat wasn’t seaworthy. These days I think I would choose Malraux’s Man’s Fate, for that novel’s nuanced meditation on the great personal costs and redeeming value of political idealism.
Describe your reading habits. Paper or electronic? Do you take notes?
Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it’s words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend storming through the house, defaming the mysterious forces who “hid my book.”
Read more than one book at a time?
I’m often sampling more than one book, as I’m deciding what I’ll devote myself to next.
Listen to audiobooks?
Audiobooks are generally reserved for poetry. How neat is it to listen to Philip Levine on the way to the grocery store?
You’ve been the president of the Authors Guild since 2010. How has that experience changed the way you think about, select, buy, and read books?
Not a lot. Naturally, I’m more committed to books written by the authors on the guild’s board, a very gifted bunch. And although I shop like mad on Amazon, I buy books there only as a last resort, as a lame protest against some of the company’s book-selling practices.
What were your favorite books as a child?
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.
Do you have a favorite character or hero?
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.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
I may be the only person in captivity who wasn’t persuaded by The Remains of the Day, which I regarded as largely a parlor trick with the passive voice. I also have had a violent reaction against a couple of Toni Morrison’s novels, which I deemed deliberately opaque.
Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I do that so often I have a term for it—I say I “read at” a book. That is seldom a comment on the quality of the work, more the sign of a wandering mind. I’ve been known to come back to a book months or years later and finish it with enormous enthusiasm. The last one in that category was The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I adore the company of other writers, because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course we get each other in a unique way. (That’s probably a common feeling in all professions; certainly I know many lawyers who are bored by anybody who isn’t an attorney.) But I haven’t found my friendships with other writers to be especially revelatory about the literary process. Overall, I hold to the saying that “writers are better read than met,” meaning only that what makes them fascinating is on the page and not on their sleeves. Still, I’m full of regret at the moment that my relationship with Dutch Leonard went no further than a couple of notes back and forth, just so I could have paid tribute in person. And it would have been a revelation to hang out around Shakespeare in close quarters between 1604 and 1606. How does one human write Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth inside three years, not to mention a few sonnets that will be read forever? It would almost be like watching the earth and heavens created in seven days.
What do you plan to read next?
Well, let me tell you what’s queued up: Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a classic of Brazilian literature, which I’m taking up because I’m headed to the country; Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson; Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell; and Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds, one of those books I’m returning to because of my son’s rapturous endorsement.
Scott Turow is the author of Presumed Innocent, Innocent, and Identical, among other novels. His works of nonfiction include One L and Ultimate Punishment.
Donna Tartt
What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?
I’ve always got a dozen books going, which is why my suitcases are always so heavy. At the moment: Am greatly enjoying the Neversink Library reissue of Jean Cocteau’s Difficulty of Being, since my copy from college is so torn up the pages are falling out. Am also loving Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba and Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape, a charming appreciation of Catullus and Propertius and the Latin poets. (I love almost all the reissues of the New York Review Books Classics—at the Corner Bookstore, uptown, they shelve them all together, and I always make a beeline for that shelf the instant I set foot in the store.) On the table by my bed: Byron: The Last Journey, by Harold Nicolson; Horse, Flower, Bird, by Kate Bernheimer; Barry Paris’s biography of Louise Brooks; and Rifleman: A Front-Line Life, by Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud. I always have a comfort book going too, something I’ve read many times, and for me at the moment that comfort book is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
I certainly hav
en’t enjoyed anything more than The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly, which I went back and reread sometime early this year. I’ve loved it since I was a teenager and like always to have it to hand; when I lived in France, years ago, it was one of only six books I carried with me—but because of its aphoristic nature, usually I only read bits and pieces of it, and it’s been many years since I read the whole thing start to finish.
Who are your favorite novelists?
The novelists I love best, the ones who made me want to become a writer, are mostly from the nineteenth century: Dickens, Melville, James, Conrad, Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, with Dickens probably coming first in that list. As far as twentieth-century novelists go, I love Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Don DeLillo; and of the twenty-first century, my two favorites so far are Edward St. Aubyn and Paul Murray.
What’s the best thing about writing a novel?
I love having an alternate life to retreat into and to lose myself in. I love being away from the world so long—so far out from shore. Eleven years.
The hardest?
Honestly, there are so many hard things about writing a novel that it’s hard to pick just one, but I particularly hate having to try to formulate an answer when someone asks me: What’s your book about?
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
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. Those things were not my cup of tea, even when I was small, and I knew it—although if something’s written well enough, anything goes. To paraphrase Nabokov: all I want from a book is the tingle down the spine, for my hairs to stand on end.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
I was a great fan of the now defunct Loompanics press, which published such self-help classics as The Complete Guide to Lock Picking and How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
See above.
How do you organize your own personal library?
Not very well, I’m afraid. But I know where everything is.
Do you keep books or give them away?
Keep them. But I give lots of books as gifts.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
I wouldn’t dream of requiring the president to read a book; he’s far too busy, and besides, I think we probably wouldn’t enjoy the same books.
Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your heroes?
As a child I adored Huckleberry Finn and Peter Pan. As a teenager: Franny Glass. In my twenties: Agatha Runcible.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?
This to me is the most interesting question on the list, as it’s something I spend a great deal of time thinking about every day. Just because you love a writer’s books doesn’t necessarily mean they would be great company. I’d love to meet Oscar Wilde, because they all say he was so much more wonderful in person than on the page. From reading the journals of Tennessee Williams, I’m almost positive that if Tennessee and I had ever met, we would have been friends. And if it was a dinner date? Albert Camus. That trench coat! That cigarette! I think my French is good enough. We’d have a great time.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
I don’t like Hemingway. And I know I don’t love Ulysses as much as I am supposed to—but then again, I never cared even one-tenth so much for the Odyssey as I do for the Iliad.
Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
Definitely I do, but impolitic to say.
If you could be any character from literature, who would you be?
This is a hard question, because so many great characters from literature come to bad ends. Mrs. Stitch, from Scoop, driving around madly in her tiny motorcar, looks like she’s having a lot of fun, though. So does Tom Ripley.
What book have you always meant to read and never gotten around to yet? What do you feel embarrassed never to have read?
I’m looking at Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on my shelf—somehow I’ve never managed to read the whole thing. And I’ve never read most of the novels of Thomas Hardy, although I don’t feel embarrassed about it. Even though I love a lot of his poetry, his novels are just too sad for me.
What will you read next?
Lord Rochester’s Monkey, by Graham Greene. And—now that it’s out—Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King.
Donna Tartt is the author of the novels The Goldfinch, The Secret History, and The Little Friend.
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Stories I’m Drawn To (Continued)
I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls. It’s a variation on the noble cause, I guess. I avoid stories that explain the villain and why he acts out. It’s just not that interesting to me. I like the bargain that good cops make. Like a law of physics, they go into darkness; darkness goes into them. They have to decide how to prevent it from destroying them.
—Michael Connelly
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.
—Anna Quindlen
Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities.
—Hilary Mantel
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.
—Khaled Hosseini
Anything that involves David and Goliath.
—James McBride
I like stories where people suffer a lot. If there’s no suffering, I kind of tune out. After reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir, My Struggle, I was shocked to discover that people suffer in Norway as well. Good for them! Skal!
—Gary Shteyngart
* * *
Ann Patchett
What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. And all the books I mention below. It’s been a great year for reading.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
In the best-case scenario, I know nothing about the book, and reading it is my sole obligation. For example, I read J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy as a pile of paper because I was going to interview her. I thought that book was brilliant. When it came out and got such middling reviews I was mystified. I felt so lucky to have had my own experience with it. I recently read Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch the same way, eight hundred pieces of paper and no explanation of what was coming. I stayed on the couch for three days and did nothing but read. People have such high expectations for Donna’s novels because they come around so rarely, and she knocked this one out of the park.
Is there anything that especially inclines you to pick up a particular book—are you swayed by covers, titles, blurbs, reviews, what your best friend has to say?
I’m swayed by everything, which is why it’s nice to read a book as a pile of paper every now and then. A well-written rave review always catches my attention. Baz Dreisinger’s review of Jim McBride’s The Good Lord Bird was so convincing that I went straight to the bookstore and bought myself a copy. I’m pleased to report that McBride deserved every bit of the praise. I also read two great revi
ews by Barbara Kingsolver this year—one of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and the other of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things. I thought that Kingsolver, who loved both books, was right on the money.
How has owning a bookstore changed your approach to deciding what to read?
If I’d done this interview two years ago, I’d be telling you how much I was enjoying rereading The Ambassadors. Parnassus has made me a very current reader. I read a lot of galleys. I read the books of the people who are coming to the store. I miss having time for James, but I’m also enjoying myself immensely.
Please take a moment to herald your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.
Geoffrey Wolff! I asked Vintage to put A Day at the Beach back in print so I could take it with me on book tour in November. I’m a big fan of all of Wolff’s work, but this is the best book of essays I know. I’ve become a very convincing bookseller, and I plan to sell the hell out of this one.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
Living Room, an out-of-print book of photographs by Nick Waplington. The photographer Melissa Ann Pinney gave it to me years ago. It’s still the book I want to show everyone who comes to my house. And the illustrator Barry Moser is a great friend, and the books of his that he’s given me over the years would be the first things I would grab if the house were on fire (assuming my husband and dog were already outside).
Tell us about your favorite memoirs.
Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying is probably my favorite. I also love her new novel, Claire of the Sea Light. She’s so smart and such a beautiful writer. She knows exactly how to break my heart and put it back together again. Patti Smith’s Just Kids reminded me of what it felt like to be young and want so much to be an artist and live a meaningful life. And then there’s Moss Hart’s Act One. Act One is one of the best things about owning a bookstore. I can sell Act One to people all day long.