by Pamela Paul
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
I’d like to believe that the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, has time to read more than one book. But picking just one book reveals my bias: Physics for Future Presidents, by Richard A. Muller (2009) is, of course, already conceived for this purpose. The president’s science adviser has traditionally been a physicist. Parting the layered curtains of science reveals that there’s no understanding of biology without chemistry, and there is no understanding of chemistry without physics. Informed people in government have known this from the beginning. And all of engineering derives from the laws of physics themselves. So the physics literacy of a president is a good thing, especially since innovations in science and technology will drive the engines of twenty-first-century economies. Failure to understand or invest wisely here will doom a nation to economic irrelevance.
What books have you most enjoyed sharing with your children?
The last book that I read to both of my kids, at the same time, was Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). At the time, they were both old enough to read on their own, but I nonetheless invited them to hear my recitation, in four or five sittings. Only when you read the original book do you realize how much of an undisciplined, stubborn, troublemaking truant Pinocchio actually was—complete with him squashing Jiminy Cricket, reducing him to a mere smudge on the wall, killing his short-lived spiritual adviser early in the story. The book served as an excellent example of how not to behave as a child. And it further served as a reminder of how Hollywood, or Disney in particular, can denude fairy tales of their strongest messages.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Oscar Wilde. Anyone who could pen the phrase “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” gets a seat at my dinner table. Also, I’ve been intrigued by the breadth of topics that interested Edgar Allan Poe. In particular, his prose poem of speculative science called “Eureka” (1848), which lays out basic tenets of modern cosmology, seventy years before cosmology even existed as a subject of study. For all we know, their best-known works are only the tip of an iceberg of mental processing and thoughts that engaged them daily. These would surely be thoughts that would emerge during a nice meal I might have with them, over a good bottle of wine.
If you could be any character from literature, who would you be?
I’d be Thomas Stockmann, the medical doctor in the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People. And I’d handle the situation a bit differently. I’d alert the townspeople of the problem with their public baths in such a way that they would welcome the news rather than reject it. This requires sensitivity to how people think and an awareness of what they value in life and why. The town might then have been compelled to fix the problem rather than view the messenger and his message as their enemy. When I first read the story, I was astonished that educated adults would behave in such a manner and was prepared to discount the whole story as a work of unrealistic fiction. I would later see actual people—including those in power—behave in just this way on all manner of scientific topics, instilling within me the urge to become the doctor’s character and make everything OK.
What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?
Although I’m not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story. Instead, at cocktail parties, I’ve always found it a bit awkward when I’m not up-to-date on all the latest novels and other written works that get reviewed in The New York Review of Books. That means I’m not only not reading the hottest novels, I’m not even reading the reviews of the novels themselves.
What do you plan to read next?
Four books that I just acquired from an antiquarian bookseller—short monographs by the philosopher, mathematician, and social activist Bertrand Russell: Justice in War-Time (the 1924 printing), Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1932 edition), Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959), and Has Man a Future? (1961). It’s always refreshing to see what a deep-thinking, smart, and worldly person (who is not a politician) has to say about the social and geopolitical challenges of the day.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, the host of Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, and the author of The Pluto Files, among other books.
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Childhood Idols (Continued)
I wanted to be Meg Murry, the admittedly geeky heroine of A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. I loved how she worked with others to fight against an unjust system and how she fought to save her family against very long odds. I was also captivated by the concept of time travel. I keep asking Facebook’s engineers to build me a tesseract so I, too, could fold the fabric of time and space.
—Sheryl Sandberg
Once I’d banished King Arthur, and I was nine or ten, the characters I lived through were the two leading men in Kidnapped, the strait-laced young David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck. The lessons I learned through David were that you had to leave home, go out into the world, and become your own man; and you must not despise any unlikely role models you might meet. I didn’t find any similar story to teach me about being a woman.
—Hilary Mantel
Horton. He’s the one who heard a Who and hatched an egg. I was a big Dr. Seuss fan when I was very young—I had The Sneetches and Horton Hatches the Egg memorized before I started kindergarten, and much to the dismay of my friends, I can still recite big chunks of them.
—Jeannette Walls
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.
—Curtis Sittenfeld
Peter Pan. I loved Peter Pan. Still love Peter Pan. Peter Pan is the only ride that I enjoyed at Disney. And I’m pretty sure that I wrote the Maximum Ride books for kids—starting with my own beloved Jack—because of my affection as a child for Peter Pan.
—James Patterson
Starting at about eleven, with Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll, I began identifying with the writer—or what I’ve learned now to call “the implicit author”—of a given fiction, rather than with the characters directly. Possibly some would say this explains a deficit of heroes in my stories.
—Jonathan Lethem
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.
—Sting
As a child I adored Huckleberry Finn and Peter Pan. As a teenager: Franny Glass. In my twenties: Agatha Runcible.
—Donna Tartt
Tintin is my favorite children’s book hero, or maybe it’s Captain Haddock. Tintin was willing to walk around on the bottom of the sea, trusting the two detectives to crank his air pump. Nobody can draw Tibetan mountainsides like Hergé. In the morning, in bed, I sometimes raise my fist and cry, “Action Stations!”—as Haddock did when he was startled awake from a doze.
—Nicholson Baker
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E. L. Doctorow
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Well, it could be Herodotus’s The Histories in the Landmark edition published by Pantheon. Herodotus is spectacular—part historian, part investigative reporter and inveterate storyteller. Or maybe Mind and Cosmos, by Thomas Nagel, an intense philosophical takedown of neo-Darwinism and scientific materialism.
It’s a brave contrarian book. Reminds me of Wittgenstein’s remark: “Even if all our scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.” Another best is Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. A beautiful conceit runs this novel—an epic journey by limo across midtown Manhattan. And then his new story collection, The Angel Esmeralda. DeLillo has a consummate comprehension of the world. And then Harold Bloom’s The American Religion, which argues that our domestic Christian religions are more Gnosticism than Christian. Mormonism in his view is the religious future of this country. And I’m recently into From Eternity to Here—the physicist Sean Carroll’s fascinating book about time. Time confounds the physicists. They ask why it goes only one way. And finally, if a reread qualifies, I’m going again through Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Here’s a book that can be sung.
When and where do you like to read?
At my desk. Or out of doors in the backyard when the weather’s fine.
As a rereader, what books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
Montaigne. Chekhov. They never fail you. Montaigne is the most honest memoirist in the world: He didn’t try to construct a narrative of his life; he just went wherever his thoughts took him, diving into his own mind and setting down its reflections and feelings for everyone to see. A kind of experiment in self-portraiture under a white light—published under the title Essais, or Essays. As for Anton Chekhov, no one puts life onto the page as Chekhov does. He defies critical analysis—the prose seems artless, as if he just splashes out the sentences. I recommend the five short novels including The Duel and Three Years in the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. But the truth is, I’ve never read any translation of Chekhov in which that rigorously judicious mind didn’t come through.
You were involved in theater while in college and were a script reader in Hollywood. How did those experiences inform your approach to storytelling?
Yes, I was heavily involved in acting at Kenyon College. I find that astonishing now. Who was this boy playing Edgar in King Lear, and Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy? At the time, I intended to write for the theater, you see, and so needed experience onstage to understand what actors went through. And when you are cast in a role as I was as Gloucester’s good son, you read the text intently, obsessively, as you might not read it as, say, an English major. And so you learn how the play is put together, how it’s constructed, and how it flows forward and maintains its tension, and how character is rendered. You feel its heartbeat. And with Shakespeare, you say the words aloud and hear the music of the language, the rhythm of the meter, and that stays with you; you are in a sense given the English language as a present. So that was valuable no matter what form my writing took—because I did drift away from theater when I took up the writing of novels.
As you say, I worked as a reader for a motion picture company—not in Hollywood, but here in New York, where the publishers were. The studios were in the hunt for books that could be filmed. I read scripts, yes, but mostly novels in galleys, and that was encouraging because I saw how many bad books were being published. It was very useful to realize that simply because something was in print didn’t necessarily mean that it should have been. But there were some great moments in that job: I remember finding on my desk a first-draft partial manuscript of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. It was under option by Columbia Pictures, and I urged them to pick up the option. Of course they didn’t. But Bellow was important to me—I’d read his Adventures of Augie March in college, and it was in the nature of a revelation, the freedom in that narrative—that there were no rules for the writing of a novel except as you made them up.
Some months later the finished Henderson was published, and I found the first third of the book disappointing. It was somehow less than it had been in manuscript. Bellow had neatened things up; he’d met some formal obligations of the story, but in so doing he’d flattened the life out of it. I found that instructive.
You spent your early years as an editor at the New American Library and the Dial Press. What are your fondest memories of working in publishing? What has been the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the field?
At New American Library, a mass-market reprinter, we were publishing books with a price of fifty or seventy-five cents or a dollar and a quarter for a huge novel, and distributing them in great numbers all over the country. Or we’d buy a good first novel that had sold maybe two thousand copies in hardcover, and print a hundred thousand and put it in every airport and railroad and bus station in the country. That was wonderfully satisfying work. NAL’s list was eclectic—publishing Mickey Spillane, but also Faulkner; Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, but also Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. We published The Signet Classic Shakespeare, of which I was the house editor, and a science list which fell to me to handle. It was all very exciting, reading these books, bidding for the reprint rights, entertaining proposals, and dealing with the likes of Ayn Rand and Ian Fleming. But the game changed with the advent of the trade paperback. Trade publishers were now keeping the reprint rights for lists of their own. And so the mass-market business changed, and some of the reprinters went to what they called “originals”—genre products like thrillers, romances, and so on. You can still find good classic public-domain titles at the big paperback houses like NAL, but they’re not freely distributed as they used to be—they are mostly on educational lists so far as I can tell.
I moved over to Dial, a trade publisher, in the mid-1960s, and it was a very exciting place to be—not only because this was the ’60s but because your most creative juices were required just to keep that house in business. I was editing Mailer, James Baldwin. I published William Kennedy’s first novel, Ernest J. Gaines, Thomas Berger, and a book by Joan Baez. But also a hoax called Report from Iron Mountain, a satirically inspired, dryly written presumed government study claiming that peace was not only unattainable but undesirable. This was during the Vietnam War, you see. The book was covered on the front page of The New York Times and hit the bestseller list.
Conglomeration—the acquisition of houses by large corporations—is the story of how things have changed. Trade publishing was never purely a business. How could it be when a house’s prime assets were the tastes of its editors? You floated the consequential books with the money you earned with the commercial things on your list. Publishing was a cottage industry. People loved to be in it and took its low salaries in return for its creative excitements. A house’s balance sheet could veer from good to dismal and back again from year to year. That’s because it didn’t offer products that were endlessly the same, like breakfast cereals or automobile tires. The hunches of its editors were very hard to quantify on a balance sheet. Now, wanting publishing to be a business like any other, the big conglomerates naturally like to increase their profit margins from one year to the next. There’s a pressure on editors to sober up and produce books that earn their keep. Oddly the conglomerates have more money to play with, and so, perversely, they may be less daring, less freewheeling. This is not true of the best of them, of course. Good books are still published with vigor and are still major acts of the culture, but the corporate ethos makes it probably not as much fun.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?
The Oxford Study Bible. And mysteries and thrillers: Simenon, but not Agatha Christie. That Swedish couple of forty or fifty years ago, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Of the current practitioners, John Sandford and Lee Child. Two very skilled and smart writers.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
I think the books I read as a child made me want to write: Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped; C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra; Mark Twain’s boy books, and his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang; Dickens’s David Copperfield, Great Expectations,
and A Tale of Two Cities; Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Poe’s detective and horror stories; the Horatio Hornblower sea novels of C. S. Forester; all the Oz books; and in middle school, Mario and the Magician, by Thomas Mann, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. For starters.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
He’s a reader and doesn’t need my instruction. On the other hand, if I could require Republican members of Congress to read one book it would be Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?
No, they may track my life—as a child, as a student, as an editor, and as a writer—and I think of them as precious objects, but they’re like life in not being organized. Though I did at one point put some of my books together on one shelf—the works of the poets I read in college—Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Frost, Wallace Stevens, A. E. Housman. And also the books of poets who’ve been friends of mine—James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine.
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?
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 is the author of many books, including The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The March, and most recently, Andrew’s Brain.
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Someone Else Should Write
I’d love to read a concise, nonhysterical biography of Michael Jackson. I just want to know everything about him.