by Pamela Paul
—Isabel Allende
I like to read either in motion or in water. And so I am most satisfied reading on subway cars, trains, planes, ferries, boats, or floating on some kind of air-filled device or raft in a pool, pond, or lake. But I am happiest reading in the bathtub; lying back with my head resting on the curved end of the tub, one leg bent and the other resting along the edge. Now and then I add a little hot water with a circular motion of my toe. I decided on my apartment because it had a deep tub with water jets to massage me while I read science fiction and magical realism.
—Walter Mosley
The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime. I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.
—Khaled Hosseini
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.
—Amy Tan
In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder … my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I’d be fourteen, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.
—Hilary Mantel
* * *
Jeffrey Eugenides
What book is on your night stand now?
Right now I’m shuttling between The Map and the Territory, by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn, which everyone I know seems to be reading.
Houellebecq’s known for being a provocateur. He’ll say things like “Life was expensive in the west, it was cold there; the prostitution was of poor quality.” His book Platform, which is about sex tourism and Islamic terrorism, got him sued in France. What’s less appreciated is how acute he is on the subjects of business and the macro effects of global capitalism. His books are the strangest confections: part Gallic anomie, part sociological analysis, part Harold Robbins. He says a lot of depressing, un-American things I get a big kick out of.
What’s the last truly great book you read?
The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro. There’s not one story in there that isn’t perfect. Each time I finished one, I just wanted to lie down on the floor and die. My life was complete. Munro’s prose has such a surface propriety that you’re never prepared for the shocking places her stories take you. She pulls off technical feats, too, like changing the point of view in each section of a single story. This is nearly impossible to do while carrying the necessary narrative freight forward, but she makes it look easy. Most readers don’t notice how technically inventive Munro is because her storytelling and characterization overwhelm their attention.
And what’s the best marriage plot novel ever?
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. Unlike the comedies of Austen, where the heroines all get married at the end, this book presents an anti-marriage plot. Old Mr. Touchett gives Isabel Archer a huge inheritance in order to secure her independence. The irony, however, is that the money ends up attracting the wrong suitor. James fills the book with the traditional energies of a marriage plot. You’ve got Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton courting Isabel, too, but here the heroine makes the wrong choice (the connoisseur!), and the question isn’t who will she marry but how will she survive her marriage. It’s much darker than anything Austen did, and it leads straight to the moral ambiguities and complexities of the modern novel.
And the most useful book you read while at Brown?
I arrived at college keen to develop a life philosophy. The idea was to begin with the Greeks and stop somewhere around Nietzsche. By reading the canonical works, I thought I could bring an order to my mind that would manifest itself in my behavior and decisions. Now, thirty years later, I look back and have to admit it didn’t happen. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I read at college. It’s all in pieces, bright patches of embroidered detail about Augustan Rome or early Islam or Renaissance Italy or the modernists, but not a complete tapestry. I’ve got Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence on my bookshelf here. That’s the kind of book I’m a sucker for. I want to get it all explained in one shot. But you know what? I’ve tried to read that book three separate times, and I never get past page fifty.
In the end, it was the useless books I read at college that have stayed with me. I think of the last pages of Lolita, where Humbert Humbert hears children’s voices and recognizes the harm he’s brought Dolores Haze, and the sentence comes immediately back: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” To see a writer describe the world with such specificity, and to learn that this formulation of words went beyond words—that it taught you about pity and shame, as well as beauty, liveliness, and compassion—that’s what stuck with me. Not a coherent system, maybe. But a few constellations to set my course by.
Any guilty reading pleasures—book, periodical, online?
The only thing I’m high-minded about is literature. It’s not an elitist stance; it’s temperamental. Whenever I try to read a thriller or a detective novel I get incredibly bored, both by the language and the narrative machinery. Since I’m so naturally virtuous on the literary front, I don’t see why I can’t slum elsewhere, and I do, guiltlessly. I’m the guy in the waiting room flipping through People. Bellow said that fiction was “the higher autobiography,” but really it’s the higher gossip.
What was the last book that made you cry?
The South Beach Diet.
The last book that made you laugh?
The Houellebecq and St. Aubyn are both making me laugh, but the St. Aubyn is more intentionally funny. And Christopher Hitchens’s memoir. There’s a line in there that goes something like, “By that time, my looks had declined to such a degree that only women would go to bed with me.”
The last book that made you furious?
It’s a while ago now, but James Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow irked me to no end. Bellow’s talent fills Atlas with envy. And so he avoids any true accounting of the work to spend his time telling the reader that Bellow wasn’t so hot in the sack, etc. But readers of literary biographies don’t want to sleep with their subjects; they want to read them.
You teach creative writing at Princeton. What books do you find most useful as a teacher?
I teach a writing workshop, so there’s not a big reading list. It’s “useful” (you like that word) to provide models of the form: Chekhov, Joyce’s Dubliners, etc. But I teach undergraduates, and sometimes they’re not ready to receive the lessons in craft that those writers exemplify. The story I assign every year that gets my students most enthralled with the idea of writing fiction is “Jon,” by George Saunders.
Your first novel was made into a film by Sofia Coppola. If The Marriage Plot were made into a movie and you could give the director a few words of advice, what would they be?
Well, I should be able to give the director a few words of advice, because I’m cowriting the screenplay with him. In fact, we had drinks the other day, and I said: “Forget about making a faithful adaptation. What we have to do is break the book apart and find a cinematic equivalent of its literary mechanics.” What you want, if your novel becomes a movie, is for
the movie to be good. Of course, you want to tell the same story. But you have to find a new way of presenting it. Plus, I wrote the book already. It would be boring to replicate it scene by scene. As well as unwise.
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
My worst book. I wish someone would write that one so I won’t have to.
You’re organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive. Who’s coming?
First I call Shakespeare. “Who else is coming?” Shakespeare asks. “Tolstoy,” I answer. “I’m busy that night,” Shakespeare says. Next I call Kafka, who agrees to come. “As long as you don’t invite Tolstoy.” “I already invited Tolstoy,” I tell him. “But Kundera’s coming. You like Milan. And you guys can speak Czech.” “I speak German,” Kafka corrects me.
When Tolstoy hears that Kundera’s coming, he drops out. (Something about an old book review.) So finally I call Joyce, who’s always available. When we get to the restaurant, Kafka wants a table in back. He’s afraid of being recognized. Joyce, who’s already plastered, says, “If anyone’s going to be recognized, it’s me.” Kundera leans over and whispers in my ear, “People might recognize us too if we went around with a cane.”
The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.
You’ve said your next book will be a collection of stories. Any recent short story collections you’d recommend?
How about a long story? Claire Keegan’s “Foster.” It’s told from the point of view of an Irish girl whose parents, lacking the money to care for her, send her to live with childless relatives, whom she ends up preferring. The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, every single word in the right place and pregnant with double meanings.
You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?
The King James Bible. Anna Karenina. And a how-to book on raft-building.
What do you plan to read next?
T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I’m reading this despite my aversion to books with colons in their titles. Luhrmann’s an anthropologist who teaches at Stanford. I heard an interview with her on the radio and was struck by how nonjudgmental she sounded. And it’s a subject that interests me for a lot of reasons, historical, political, and artistic.
Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot.
J. K. Rowling
What’s the best book you read this summer?
I loved The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.
What was the last truly great book you read?
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I lived in it the way that you do with truly great books; putting it down with glazed eyes and feeling disconcerted to find yourself in the twenty-first century. I met the author at a reception in the American Embassy in London last year, and I was so excited that I was bobbing up and down on the spot like a five-year-old.
Any literary genre you simply can’t be bothered with?
“Can’t be bothered with” isn’t a phrase I’d use, because my reading tastes are pretty catholic. I don’t read “chick lit,” fantasy, or science fiction, but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill. With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.
On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
What was the last book that made you cry?
The honest answer is The Casual Vacancy. I bawled while writing the ending, while rereading it, and when editing it.
The last book that made you laugh?
The Diaries of Auberon Waugh. It’s in my bathroom, and it’s always good for a giggle.
The last book that made you furious?
As Margaret Thatcher might say, I don’t wish to give it the oxygen of publicity.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The prime minister?
The president’s already read Team of Rivals, and I can’t think of anything better for him. I’d give our prime minister Justice, by Michael Sandel.
What were your favorite books as a child?
The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge; Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; Manxmouse, by Paul Gallico; everything by Noel Streatfeild; everything by E. Nesbit; Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell (indeed, anything with a horse in it).
Did you have a favorite character or hero as a child? Do you have a literary hero as an adult?
My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.
What’s the best book your mother ever gave or read to you?
She gave me virtually all the books mentioned above. My most vivid memory of being read to is my father reading The Wind in the Willows when I was around four and suffering from the measles. In fact, that’s all I remember about having the measles: Ratty, Mole, and Badger.
What books have your own children introduced you to recently? Or you to them?
My son introduced me to Cressida Cowell’s dragon books, which are so good and funny. My younger daughter is pony mad, so we’re halfway through a box set by Pippa Funnell. I recently started pressing Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on my elder daughter, who is a scientist.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I took this question so seriously I lost hours to it. I went through all of my favorite writers, discarding them for various reasons: P. G. Wodehouse, for instance, was so shy that it might be a very awkward meeting. Judging by his letters, his main interests were Pekingese dogs and writing methodology. As I don’t own a Peke I’ve got a feeling we’d just discuss laptops rather than exploring the secrets of his genius.
I finally narrowed the field to two: Colette and Dickens. If Colette were prepared to talk freely, it would be the meeting of a lifetime because she led such an incredible life (her biography, Secrets of the Flesh, by Judith Thurman, is one of my all-time favorites). By the narrowest of margins, though, I think I’d meet Dickens. What would I want to know? Everything.
Do you remember the best fan letter you ever received? What made it special?
There have been so many extraordinary fan letters, but I’m going to have to say it was the first one I ever received, from a young girl called Francesca Gray. It meant the world to me.
So many children’s books today try to compare themselves to Harry Potter. If your new book, The Casual Vacancy, were to be compared to another book, author, or series in your dream book review, what would it be?
The Casual Vacancy consciously harked back to the nineteenth-century traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Gaskell; an analysis of a small, literally parochial society. Any review that made reference to any of those writers would delight me.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?
My heart is divided three ways: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and The Casual Vacancy.
There’s a whole publishing subi
ndustry of books about Harry Potter. Have you read any of them, or any of the scholarly articles devoted to the books?
No, except for two pages of a book claiming to reveal the Christian subtext. It convinced me that I ought not to read any others.
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
The Playboy of the Western World, the second volume of Nigel Hamilton’s biography of JFK and sequel to Reckless Youth.
If you could bring only three books to a desert island, which would you pack?
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.
If you could be any character from literature, who would it be?
Elizabeth Bennet, naturally.
What was the last book you just couldn’t finish?
Armadale, by Wilkie Collins. Having loved The Woman in White and The Moonstone, I took it on tour with me to the United States in 2007 anticipating a real treat. The implausibility of the plot was so exasperating that I abandoned it midread, something I hardly ever do.
What do you plan to read next?
There are three books that I need to read for research sitting on my desk, but for pleasure, because I love a good whodunit and she’s a master, I’m going to read The Vanishing Point, by Val McDermid.
J. K. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter series and the novels The Casual Vacancy, The Cuckoo’s Calling, and The Silkworm, the last two under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
David Mitchell
What book is on your night stand now?
Postwar, by the historian Tony Judt; David Finkel’s account of US forces in Iraq, The Good Soldiers; and a proof of Nadeem Aslam’s new book, The Blind Man’s Garden, which I haven’t started yet. Plus my notebook, in case a decent idea ambushes me after turning out the light.
