By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  After I read Charlotte’s Web, I became so obsessed with pigs that my stepfather got me one for my ninth birthday. It was because of that pig that I became a vegetarian. That’s impact.

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

  I grew up in a house full of books. My memories are of my parents reading, but not of them reading to me. I don’t mean that critically. They loved books. I wanted to read what they were reading. I read Humboldt’s Gift when I was fifteen because my mother had just finished it. After that, it was all Saul Bellow all the time. I read Humboldt again a few months ago, and I was amazed by how clearly I remembered it. Nobody writes like that anymore—maybe Michael Chabon.

  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?

  Do you mean today? I get so many galleys—at my house, at the bookstore—there are books stacked up everywhere that people want me to read. I probably quit reading a couple books a week. I have to love a book, or at least have an enormous sense of obligation toward a book, in order to keep going.

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

  I’d want to see my friend Lucy Grealy again. I’d want to know how the afterlife was treating her, if there was anything or everything about this world she missed. She’d say to me, “My God, how did you get here?” And I would say, “The New York Times Book Review told me I could meet any writer, living or dead, and I picked you!” Then I imagine there would be a great deal of hugging and dancing around.

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

  Mowgli and his crowd. We could invite Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig over, make it a talking-animal party.

  What’s next on your reading list?

  J. Courtney Sullivan came to read at Parnassus, and I gave her a copy of Jeannette Haien’s The All of It. She sent me Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy in return. I very much want to read that. Also, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. And the new Doris Kearns Goodwin; that’s a must. I’m a Doris Kearns Goodwin completist.

  Ann Patchett is the author of Bel Canto, State of Wonder, The Patron Saint of Liars, and Truth and Beauty, among other books.

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  What to Read on that Desert Island

  Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and How to Build a Working Airplane Out of Coconuts.

  —Michael Chabon

  The King James Bible. Anna Karenina. And a how-to book on raft-building.

  —Jeffrey Eugenides

  Collected works of Shakespeare (not cheating—I’ve got a single volume of them); collected works of P. G. Wodehouse (two volumes, but I’m sure I could find one); collected works of Colette.

  —J. K. Rowling

  This is a question that always kills me. For a book lover this type of triage is never a record of what was brought along but a record of what was left behind. But if forced to choose by, say, a shipwreck or an evil Times editor, I’d probably grab novels that I’m still wrestling with. Like Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (which in my opinion is one of the greatest and most perplexing novels of the twentieth century) or Toni Morrison’s Beloved (to be an American writer or to be interested in American literature and not to have read Beloved, in my insufferable calculus, is like calling yourself a sailor and never having bothered to touch the sea) or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (so horrifyingly profound and compellingly ingenious it’s almost sorcery). Maybe Octavia Butler’s Dawn (set in a future where the remnants of the human race are forced to “trade” genes—read: breed involuntarily—with our new alien overlords). Or Gilbert Hernandez’s Beyond Palomar (if it wasn’t for Poison River I don’t think I would have become a writer). To be honest I’d probably hold a bunch of these books in hand and only decide at the last instant, as the water was flooding up around my knees, which three I’d bring. And then I’d spend the rest of that time on the desert island dreaming about the books that I left behind and also of all the books, new and old, that I wasn’t getting a chance to read.

  —Junot Díaz

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  Amy Tan

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

  Richard Ford’s Canada. I’ve loved all his books, from the characters to the parenthetical sentences. His voice always sounds so casual, as if the narrator is working it out in his head for the first time. There’s quiet intensity, an easy familiarity with the character. You know the habits in how the character thinks, what he might take into account. The narrator is more observational than judgmental, and forgiving in that way. It has much to do with a need to be rewarded for doing more, or compensated for following the rules or recognized as better for working harder. It’s not simple greed. It’s about a sense of self before and after you’ve taken the wrong road to a land of diminishing opportunity.

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

  I’ve often fantasized I would get a lot of writing done if I were put in prison for a minor crime. Three to six months. Incarceration would be good for reading as well. No e-mail, no useless warranties to get steamed about, no invitations to fund-raisers. But until I commit the necessary minor crime, I would choose a twelve-hour flight. Time flies by fast with a good book. Two benefits. I do have to pick the right-length book matched to destination. It’s terrible to have twenty pages left and then be told to put your seat in an upright position. That happened when I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

  Who are your favorite novelists?

  My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place, and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite. In the past, they have included: Louise Erdrich, Vladimir Nabokov, Javier Marías, Richard Ford, Ha Jin, Annie Proulx, Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Jamaica Kincaid—many, many others.

  Do you have a favorite classic work of Chinese literature?

  Jing Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). The author is anonymous. I would describe it as a book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers, because it was banned as pornographic. It has a fairly modern, naturalistic style—“Show, don’t tell”—and there are a lot of sex scenes shown. For years, I didn’t know I had the expurgated edition that provided only elliptical hints of what went on between falling into bed and waking up refreshed. The unexpurgated edition is instructional.

  Who are the best Chinese and Chinese-American writers working today?

  I’ve read Chinese novels only in translation, which limits how well I can judge who is “best.” I’ve read work by the early feminist writers Wang Anyi, Zhang Jie, and Cheng Naishan (who died recently). You have to understand how radical their novels and short stories were at the time they were published. They included notions of suffering, thwarted love, the Cultural Revolution, a forlorn look at the past, and a nostalgic Shanghai. A love story could have been seen as criticism of the Cultural Revolution. I also admire Yan Geling’s stories. Beneath beauty and idealism is cruelty and ill intent. I’ve read a couple of Mo Yan’s novels, which also could be judged as a less patriotic view of the Great Leap Forward. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, there was a flurry of criticism accusing him of being an apple polisher to the party for not speaking up for another Nobel laureate who was in prison, the dissident Liu Xiaobo. Then came the bashing of Mo Yan’s work for its crude literary style and subjects. With prizes, I’ve observed, literary merit is often a sliding scale based on the author’s political actions—or inaction.

  Among Chinese-American writers, two immediately come to mind: Yiyun Li and Ha Jin, with their particular mix of displaced characters, circumstances, and past. Their stories often have
tragedy, but rise above that. They elicit discomfort and compassion—good and necessary conditions that change me, as any writing is capable of doing by putting me in unfamiliar situations and magnifying the details I would have overlooked.

  Please take a moment to herald your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.

  For years, I have been heralding the work of Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer. His prose is gorgeous, his approach irreverent, and the ideas in his stories are sometimes comical or fantastical, but always deadly serious—very relevant to understanding the complex history behind multiple holy wars today. In Italy and Spain, his books are best sellers. He has full-page profiles in major newspapers, has garnered prizes, is a darling of literary festivals, and has won acclaim from international writers. In the United States, he’s hardly known. Why is there a geographic divide in literary appreciation?

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

  I’m open to reading almost anything—fiction, nonfiction—as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

  I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them. I haven’t sought out much science fiction since the days when my husband and I read aloud H. P. Lovecraft while sitting around the campfire on backpacking trips. In those days, I would also read aloud gruesome passages from Bear Attacks. We enjoyed scaring ourselves witless in the wilderness, where there were, in fact, many bears. These days, I simply read the news and all the horror stories about the House of Representatives.

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

  A lot of books on animal cognition and behavior—crows, ravens, dogs, and even ants. I’m a sucker for dog training books as well. And I collect antiquarian books on biology. One is a four-volume set, The Science of Life, by sci-fi writer H. G. Wells; his son G. P. Wells; and Julian Huxley, a biologist and also a prominent eugenicist.

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

  On December 7, 1999, I left the bedside of my editor Faith Sale, just before she was removed from life support. We had been like sisters. Two hours later, Stephen King called and asked my husband, Lou, and me to meet him at his hotel room. It was his first public foray after being nearly killed by a van six months before. He gave me an advance reading copy of On Writing. A couple of years before, we had talked about the question no one asks us in interviews: language. He had been thinking of doing a book on writing, and I had said, “Do it.” He now asked me to look at the dedication. It was for me. We then went to see the premiere of The Green Mile, about a man on death row who can heal people, including those dying of cancer. That night was both enormously sad and gloriously uplifting.

  What book has had the greatest impact on you?

  Probably the Bible. My father was a minister, and I heard verses every day. I memorized big whacks of passages to earn progressive levels of pins. The repetitive rhythms of the Bible were inscribed in my writing brain from childhood. (And it may account for my tendency to start sentences with “and.”) Many of my stories also relate to undoing handed-down beliefs, whether they come from religion, society, or mothers. And my writing sensibility was also warped by a steady dose of gothic imagery, often related to religious sins or virtue: David braining Goliath, Samson’s bloody head missing a lock of hair, a stinking corpse arising to be kissed by relatives.

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

  I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read—which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books are on required reading lists.

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

  Books were luxuries. We had the World Book Encyclopedia, donated Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, inspirational books by Billy Graham, Bibles in foreign languages, and my favorite, a book on a high shelf called Psychopathia Sexualis. One Christmas I received an Italian book of Chinese fairy tales. All the sages, gods, and mortals looked like Italian movie actors and actresses. I recently unearthed it.

  My mother and father didn’t read fiction books, at least not in English. But for one year, my father read to my brothers and me bedtime stories, a page a night from a book called 365 Stories, covering the daily life of happy American kids with minor dilemmas. The fiction books I read on my own came from the library. From the age of six, I carefully chose five or six every two weeks, working my way through the ones I could reach on progressively higher shelves. Fairy tales were favorites. I crossed a threshold of reader pride after finishing To Kill a Mockingbird. And I made it a point to read banned books, like The Catcher in the Rye, which led to counseling sessions with a youth minister, who told me such books would give me sinful feelings. That incident solidified feelings I have about the power of books and one’s helplessness without them.

  Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

  Jane Eyre remains a favorite. Her truthfulness sometimes made me laugh. And her loneliness and need to make her own way mirrored my feelings. The Little Prince is another lost soul I clung to. Pippi Longstocking was a bit too cheerful.

  Which writers inspire you?

  When I first started writing short stories, I read collections by Amy Hempel, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Molly Giles, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Chekhov, and many others. And then I read Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, with its strong multiple voices. The stories were bound by community and mutual loss. That later became a model for the structure of The Joy Luck Club.

  These days, any book that astonishes me can either inspire me or make me feel I should give up writing. Coetzee’s Disgrace made me feel the latter.

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

  Emily Dickinson. I would be her nursemaid, her quiet companion on walks in the woods. I imagine that anything she spotted—feathers, tea leaves, a hole in a fence—would lead her to utter something profound about human emotions in a lifetime of expectation.

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

  I would not want characters to come to my world. They’d lose their special qualities, the perfect amount of what I should know about them. On the other hand, I could go to theirs because they would not have any preconceptions of who I was. I’d like to hang out with the Cheshire cat, learn how to disappear, and speak in smart illogic. He would look exactly like his pen-and-ink illustration by Tenniel. I’d be rendered in pen and ink, too. That would be required for entering a pen-and-ink world with its particular dimensional strangeness.

  Do you miss playing with your old band, the Rock Bottom Remainders?

  I deeply miss our founder, Kathi Kamen Goldmark. But I have a feeling the Remainders will go on like the sequels of novels. We are already banding together at the Miami Book Fair to do our first annual reunion.

  What’s next on your reading list?

  I’ve just started two books. One is dark, Weights and Measures, by Joseph Roth. It fits the mood of what I feel is happening in the United States—the dangerous shifts, the disintegration of what held the country together, the moral demise of politicians, moneylenders, and heroes.

  The other is more hopeful: My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor. I’m grateful for her wisdom and compassion on the Supreme Court. In June, Justice Sotomayor invited my husband and me to have a private lunch with her in her chambers. This was right when the justices began deliberations over the major cases. We talked about our mothers’ fears, about publishing, translations, snorkeling, adopted kids, and cultural self-identification—all sorts of things, except the cases. I’ve read the first ten pages of her m
emoir and know already that it’s like a continuation of the conversation we had.

  Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement, among other books.

  Bryan Cranston

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

  Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Real insight on the thirty-sixth president from someone who knew him well.

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

  While shooting in Portland, Oregon, I got the pleasure of discovering Powell’s Books, an enormous old bookstore (which I hope still exists) and stayed there the entire day. I just curled up in a comfy chair and read. They had a cafe in the store that I frequented. What joy. I suppose it helped that it was a rainy day. Rain creates a Pavlovian response in me to relax with a good book. I find that peace at our beach house, and created a cozy nook just for that purpose. I admit that I am driven to work and have to remind myself that reading is not an indulgence or a luxury. I have to improve that aspect of my life.

  You recently recorded the audiobook version of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Are you a fan of the book? Did performing it aloud change your perception of it?

  The main reason I agreed to do the audiobook was because I had wanted to read that book and never got around to it. So I thought, why not commit to this and then I will be guaranteed to read it? These questions have exposed an uncomfortable condition, in which I can make time for reading books if it’s “work related” but not for just my own personal pleasure.… I need to see a shrink.

  What was the experience of recording a book like for you? How was it different from the theater, film, and television work you’ve done?