by Pamela Paul
I found narrating an audiobook very challenging, a task exacerbated by my suspected—but undiagnosed—mild dyslexia. Still, the experience was rewarding for the discovery that one, I did it; and two, that I won’t do another one; and three, that the strength of the story got me through the long recording sessions. It’s a real talent to convey emotions through your vocal choices and it takes real stamina. There are far better actors doing that work than myself.
Do you draw inspiration for your theater, television, and film projects from the books you read?
A) Yes. The three main tools in an actor’s toolbox are personal experience, research, and imagination. Richly drawn literary characters plant seeds in our brains for future reference. When developing a character we will unwittingly pull from those memories to form a whole character.… Then we selfishly claim them as original.
B) And vice versa. Anna Gunn, my wife on Breaking Bad, gave me a beautiful hardcover of The Dangerous Book for Boys. A perfect book to flip through to get back in touch with the little boy within. It inspired me to create a concept for a TV show.… Stay tuned.
You recently portrayed Lyndon Johnson at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in the play All the Way, a production that is headed for Broadway. Did you read any books on Johnson, aside, I presume, from Doris Kearns Goodwin, to prepare for the role? What books in particular informed your portrayal?
In addition to Goodwin’s book, I plunged into Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, Mark Updegrove’s Indomitable Will, and Michael Beschloss’s Taking Charge. And I must admit being curious about the new book, Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, but I think I’ll save that for after the run of the play.
Of all the characters you’ve played across different media, which role felt to you the richest—the most, perhaps, novelistic?
Breaking Bad’s Walter White. The depth of this tragic story made it feel like the character reached Shakespearean level.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
I like mysteries, thrillers, and adventures best. I haven’t been interested in very many science fiction novels.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
After my confession of not being attracted to sci-fi, one might be surprised to see the collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories. Love those.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
Nonfiction: The Road Less Traveled. Fiction: Moby-Dick.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
The Wizard of Oz novelist, L. Frank Baum … If he really was a racist as is rumored. And if so, how could he write such a heartfelt story? Were the Munchkins a metaphor? Did he have the Wicked Witch of the West killed off because he hated green people?
What’s next on your reading list?
After All the Way is up and running, I will transition into reading a Dalton Trumbo biography by Bruce Cook. I have once again succumbed to perusing books for occupational purposes. But I love baseball and I’m eager to read The Art of Fielding. It’s on my bed stand right now, taunting me.
Bryan Cranston is an actor best known for his starring roles on the television series Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle, and is the winner of three Emmy awards and a Golden Globe award.
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The Ideal Reading Experience (Continued)
I usually read at night, in the bed, before falling asleep. In the summertime, I love to read on the porch in a rocker under a ceiling fan.
—John Grisham
Every evening by my living room fireplace in a splendid Eames chair, giving thanks to my bad back for excusing this extravagant purchase.
—P. J. O’Rourke
I love to pick up a book, read two pages, and shake my head with wonder and gratitude that I’m going to be covered for the ten or so days I’ve got this book to which I will keep returning. Two pages into The Poisonwood Bible, Middlemarch, and In the Garden of Beasts, I said, “I’m in.”
—Anne Lamott
I like to read at the beach, but the beach always turns out to be too relaxing, and I fall asleep after two pages. So I wind up doing most of my actual reading at night in bed, where I sometimes get through as many as three pages before I fall asleep.
—Dave Barry
I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention. I read whenever I can, when I am not preparing to teach, or writing.
—Marilynne Robinson
The book creates the experience. If I’m loving something, I suddenly discover large chunks of reading time that I wasn’t aware of having. But I will say there’s nothing like being stuck in a middle seat on a long flight that begins with a two-hour delay. In a situation like that, a few years ago, I’d brought along a new novel that critics were wild about and that I was certain I would enjoy. It was so boring and dead that after fifty pages I just closed it and stared at the seat-back tray and suffered, resenting the author and psychoanalyzing the critics.
—Jonathan Franzen
I am not picky—if possible I would like to read in Rome or Paris, but since that’s usually not an option, I like to read in bed.
—Caroline Kennedy
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 prepublication 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!”
—Jeannette Walls
Reading is still my favorite pastime. It kicks writing’s butt. You learn so much more from reading than you do from writing, although writing pays slightly more. I start reading at four p.m. and continue way into cocktail hour, which begins at four thirty.
—Gary Shteyngart
My most recent, best reading experience was a vacation last summer that involved reading feverishly in a friend’s sixteenth-century stone cottage in the Corrèze, and doing the same in a cheap but airy hotel room overlooking the Corniche in Marseille. At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.
—Rachel Kushner
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Michael Connelly
Tell us about your favorite book of the year.
I think I’ll go with nonfiction and pick Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo, by Jack Cheevers. I worked with Cheevers in the early ’90s. He was a very good reporter then, and all those skills are on display in this page-turner, which jumps between high politics in Washington and the gripping high-seas journey of the spy ship in 1968. This book held me like Flyboys and Lost in Shangri-La.
When and where do you like to read?
I mostly read on airplanes and right before sleep. I admit my reading time is limited because I can write in the situations and places where people usually read. But reading is the fuel—it’s inspiring—so I try to keep the tank full. What happens most of the time is, I binge read. I will put aside a day or two to do nothing but read. I did that recently with Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?
I know I am supposed to say The Gods of Guilt here, since I just wrote it, but my favorite will probably always be The Last Coyote, because it was the first book I wrote as a full-time author, and I think the improvements were more evident to me than in the transitions between other books. But don’t confuse “favorite” book with “best” book. I am not sure I could pick a book tha
t I would say is my best. I hope I haven’t written it yet.
You’ve said that your mother introduced you to crime fiction. Which books got you hooked?
She was into P. D. James and Agatha Christie, and I liked it, but I would not say I got hooked in until I started reading John D. MacDonald, who was writing about the place where I was growing up. His character Travis McGee kept his boat, the Busted Flush, at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale. I worked there while in high school, and my boss was named in a couple of the novels. They also kept a slip open for the Flush. I thought that was pretty cool.
Who’s your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain?
It’s got to be Philip Marlowe as the detective. He had an unmatchable mixture of sardonic humor, weariness, and resolve. I’ll go with Francis Dolarhyde from Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon as the villain. He remains in the shadow of Hannibal Lecter, but I find him more realistic and a reminder that these sorts of killers are more banal than genius. That makes them scarier.
You covered crime for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel and for the Los Angeles Times. What did reporting teach you about storytelling?
That it’s all about momentum. Momentum in writing means momentum in reading. There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best—because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
What’s the best thing about writing a book?
There is a great freedom to it. You set your own hours and pace, you write without anyone looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do. It either happens or it doesn’t, but when it does there is an amazing sense of fulfillment to it. It’s like improvising jazz on a piano or saxophone. What comes out may have roots in something else, but you’ve made it yours.
The hardest or least rewarding?
The gamble you take with everything you write. Not knowing if what you created with that freedom to improvise is worth the paper you print it out on. You can put a good chunk of yourself and your time into something and only you may love it in the end.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And what do you steer clear of?
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.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
I’m not sure what would be surprising. Maybe the complete collection of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. The Public Burning, by Robert Coover? That’s one of my favorite novels of all time.
Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?
There’s a guy who writes about the Panhandle in Florida named Michael Lister. I like his stuff a lot. There’s a new practitioner of the LA crime novel named P. G. Sturges. He’s really good, too, with his stories about the Shortcut Man.
President Clinton gave you some nice publicity when he was photographed reading one of your early novels. Which of your books would you recommend to President Obama?
The Closers, because I think it’s the book that underlines Harry Bosch’s belief that everybody counts or nobody counts.
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?
Too many to list here, and I am not that impolitic anyway—at least with writers still living. But I have to say I am an impatient reader. My time to read is too short, so I only give a book—any book—a short leash. It’s got to draw me in quickly. It doesn’t matter to me who wrote it, what the pedigree is, or what the critics say. If I’m not in the car, buckled in, and riding with the story by the second chapter or so, I’m probably going back to the shelf for something else.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I’d like to ask Raymond Chandler about chapter thirteen of The Little Sister. It describes a drive around 1940s Los Angeles, and it still holds up as a description of the city right now. Beautiful. I’d ask him how he pulled that off. And I’d tell him that that short chapter of his was what made me want to become a writer. I’d also ask him whether it takes a tortured life to produce something like that. I’d say, Ray, can a writer be happy and still be good at it?
What book do you think everybody should read before they die?
The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.
What do you plan to read next?
Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi. I’ve been sitting on this one for a long time. This is the time to read it.
Michael Connelly is the author of many books, including The Black Box, The Drop, The Fifth Witness, The Reversal, The Scarecrow, The Brass Verdict, The Lincoln Lawyer, and the Harry Bosch series.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Who are your favorite science writers? Anyone new and good we should be paying attention to?
In no particular order: Dava Sobel, Timothy Ferris, Cornelia Dean, Bill Bryson, and Michael Lemonick. And I just recently discovered the delightfully irreverent books of Mary Roach. I take this occasion to note that Agnes M. Clerke, writing in the late nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, was one of the most prolific science writers in any field, although her specialty was astrophysics, then a male-dominated area. Her titles include The Concise Knowledge Library: Astronomy (1898), Problems in Astrophysics (1903), and Modern Cosmologies (1905).
If a parent asked you for book recommendations to get a child interested in science, what would be on your list?
Kids are naturally interested in science. The task is to maintain that innate interest, and not get in their way as they express it. Early on, my favorite children’s book was On the Day You Were Born (1991), written and illustrated by Debra Frasier. I’m often asked by publishers whether I will ever write a science-based children’s book. My answer will remain no until I believe I can write one better than Frasier’s. It hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t see it happening in the foreseeable future. Also, I remain impressed how fast the Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library series updated Tish Rabe’s book There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System (1999, 2009) to reflect the official 2006 demotion of Pluto to “dwarf planet” status.
What are the greatest books ever written about astronomy?
Because the field of study changes so rapidly, any book that’s great in one decade becomes hopelessly obsolete by the next. But if I am forced to pick one, it would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980). Not for the science it taught, but for how effectively the book shared why science matters—or should matter—to every citizen of the world.
And your favorite novels of all time?
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). I often find myself reflecting on the odd assortment of characters that Lemuel Gulliver met during his travels. We’re all familiar with the tiny Lilliputians, but during his voyages he also met the giant Brobdingnagians. And elsewhere he met the savage humanoid Yahoos and the breed of rational horses—the Houyhnhnms—who shunned them. And I will not soon forget the misguided scientists of the Grand Academy of Lagado beneath the levitated Island of Laputa, who invested great resources posing and answering the wrong questions about nature.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuris
tic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places, and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
I have multiple shelves of books and tracts on religion and religious philosophy, as well as on pseudoscience and general fringe thinking. I’m perennially intrigued how people who lead largely evidence-based lives can, in a belief-based part of their mind, be certain that an invisible, divine entity created an entire universe just for us, or that the government is stockpiling space aliens in a secret desert location. I find this reading to be invaluable in my efforts to communicate with all those who, while invoking these views, might fear or reject the methods, tools, and tenets of science.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
George Gamow’s One, Two, Three … Infinity (1947) and Edward Kasner and James Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination (1940) are both still in print. I have aspired to write a book as influential to others as these books have been influential to me. The closest I have come is Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (2007), but while I think it succeeds on many educational levels, I’m quite sure it falls short of what these authors accomplished. For me, at middle-school age, they turned math and science into an intellectual playground that I never wanted to leave. It’s where I first learned about the numbers googol and googolplex (a googolplex is so large, you cannot fully write it, for it contains more zeros than the number of particles in the universe). It’s also where I learned about higher dimensions and the general power of mathematics to decode the universe.