By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Mark Twain, but when he was forty, not seventy. He was a pretty nasty old man. I’m not sure what I would ask Mark Twain, but I’m pretty sure it would not be for investment advice. I wrote him a letter when I was a kid but never heard back. What an ass.

  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite? Your favorite character? What’s your favorite movie adaptation of a book you’ve written?

  My first book, A Time to Kill, is still my favorite, and Jake Brigance is still my favorite character. The best adaptation was The Rainmaker, with Francis Ford Coppola.

  If you could choose among your novels the next to be adapted into a movie, which would it be and why?

  Who doesn’t love a good movie? For this reason, I would enjoy seeing all of my books adapted to film. There are currently three or four “in production”—not sure what that means but I suspect it means little is happening. Gone are the days when I sold the film rights for a nice check, then sat back and waited eighteen months for the movie. Long gone.

  Calico Joe is being developed by Chris Columbus, who wrote a great script and plans to direct. It appears to be a fast track and should be fun to watch. My involvement is always limited, as it should be. I know nothing about making movies and have no desire to learn.

  What’s the best book about the law ever written?

  To Kill a Mockingbird.

  The best book about baseball?

  Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris.

  What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

  My next legal thriller. No—make that my next five.

  You’ve traveled all around the country for your book tours. Do you have a particular favorite place to visit as an author? A city that’s especially welcoming to writers?

  I’ve visited several death rows doing research, and they are fascinating. Prisons in general give me inspiration for stories and characters. My next book is about a lawyer in prison, and I went to visit a couple. Rich stuff.

  I don’t understand how anyone can write in a city. I live in the boondocks where it’s quiet and peaceful and when the words are slow I go for long walks through the hills. To my recollection, I’ve never written a single word of a novel in town.

  What do you plan to read next?

  I have a friend who is an obnoxious Yankee fan (aren’t they all?) and he’s hounding me to read the latest biographies of Mantle and Maris: The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood and Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero. I’ll give ’em a shot.

  John Grisham is the author of The Firm, A Time to Kill, and Sycamore Row, among other novels.

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  On Poetry

  My taste is very old-fashioned (with the exception of my beloved Frank O’Hara, unless he’s now old-fashioned, too): I like Keats, Tennyson, Milton, Shakespeare, Hopkins, all those dudes.

  —Michael Chabon

  We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you—and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. I last felt that in relation to a poem while in the sitting room of Elizabeth Bishop’s old home in rural Brazil. I stood in a corner, apart from the general conversation, and read “Under the Window: Ouro Preto.” When I finished the poem I found that my friends and our hosts had left the room. What is it precisely, that feeling of “returning” from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger—then it fades, but never completely.

  —Ian McEwan

  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.

  —J. K. Rowling

  I have many poetry collections—that’s my version of self-help. Yeats, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin. Most of my books have a poem as an epigram to guide me; the most recent one starts with “Late Fragment,” the poem Raymond Carver has on his headstone. Not enough people read poetry.

  —Anna Quindlen

  * * *

  P. J. O’Rourke

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Kearny’s March, by Winston Groom. The author of Forrest Gump has become a wonderful military historian and tells us how, as a result of the Mexican War, we acquired not just Texas but New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and—every silver lining has its cloud—California.

  When and where do you like to read?

  Every evening by my living room fireplace in a splendid Eames chair, giving thanks to my bad back for excusing this extravagant purchase.

  What was the last truly great book you read? Do you remember the last time you said to someone, “You absolutely must read this book”?

  Jane Eyre, last week. I hadn’t read it in forty-five years. If then. (I suspect CliffsNotes were involved.) I didn’t even remember who was locked in the attic. I told my wife she had to read it. She’d just done so (which I didn’t remember either) and gave me a look that conveyed Charlotte Brontë’s message to all men: The secret of a happy marriage is to have a burning house fall on you.

  Do you consider yourself a fiction or nonfiction person? What’s your favorite genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself. My favorite genre is the comedy of manners, where Christopher Buckley reigns. My guilty pleasures are the usual—crime and suspense. But my literary conscience doesn’t bother me about Ruth Rendell, P. D. James, Elmore Leonard, and Alan Furst.

  What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

  Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom gave cogent shape to a slew of inchoate feelings. No particular book made me want to write. I like to make things but, being clumsy with my hands and glib with my tongue, words are my raw material.

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

  The Road to Serfdom, no matter who is president. But a president is a busy man, and Hayek’s syntax is heavy going. Being a native German speaker, Hayek strings together railroad sentences ending in train wreck verbs. For an easier read about the connection between economic and personal liberty, I suggest Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose.

  What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?

  Behold the book with its brilliant, nonlinear search engine called flipping-through-the-pages. A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll except with batteries and electronic glitches. It’s as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the Iliad while playing a lyre. I dog-ear all my books, underline passages, and scribble “Huh?” and “How true!” in the margins. The only fit snack while reading is the olive in a martini.

  Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  A good book does all four. Three out of four isn’t bad. Two is acceptable, except for books that make you cry and teach you something, which are to be avoided at all costs.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

  I didn’t care much for children’s literature. I liked to read at random in the World Book Encyclopedia. My favorite character was Julius Caesar. His leadership style was refreshingly different from my grade school principal’s. I wish children would read Emily Post’s original Etiquette, in which Mrs. Post says—in so many words—“Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job.
”

  Disappointing, overrated, just not so good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  Ian McEwan’s Saturday—I quit just when the plot reached its crisis. I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters. (On a related note, I was reading the Harry Potter series to my ten-year-old daughter, and she made me stop in the middle of the last volume. “Too much teenage mush,” she said. I said, “Don’t you want to know if Lord Voldemort wins?” And she said, “Oh, come on, all those books and you think Harry Potter is going to die at the end?”)

  What’s the worst book about politics you’ve ever read?

  Economics, by Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, the standard textbook on the subject for my generation. Although not supposedly about politics, it contains as much bad political thinking as can be packed into a decent liberal democratic framework. (I’m not counting Das Kapital, which I consider a comedy of manners, or Mein Kampf, the worst book I’ve ever read, period.)

  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite?

  Parliament of Whores, published twenty years ago and subtitled A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government. I’ll never get such a large, slow-moving target in my sights again.

  If somebody walked in on you writing one of your books, what would they see? What does your work space look like?

  A mess—books, notes, clippings piled everywhere, an IBM Selectric for first drafts, a computer for second drafts, pencils and legal pads for really difficult passages, and me in the middle of it, doing nothing. My (very prolific) friend, the late John Hughes, said, “The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.”

  Do you remember the last book someone personally recommended you read that you enjoyed? Who recommended it and what convinced you to pick it up?

  Fifty-odd years ago my Sunday school teacher said I should read the Bible. It was thirty years before I got around to it. The King James version should be read by everyone who loves language or, for that matter, God. Divine intervention aside, I don’t listen to many recommendations.

  Is there a book you wish you could write, but feel you can’t or never will?

  I have a lovely mess of an Irish/English-American family. There’s a mash-up of Studs Lonigan and The Old Wives’ Tale in there somewhere. But I’m a reporter, not a novelist. I’m reasonably alert to what people do. Why eludes me.

  What’s the book you wish someone else would write?

  A definitive history of bohemianism, that ever-present undercurrent of antinomian thought and behavior wearing funny clothes. It should start with Petronius and his Satyricon hipsters. And I’ll bet ancient China and Pharaonic Egypt had beatniks too.

  Which do you prefer, traveling or reading travel books?

  Having recently written a travel book and just returned from taking the kids to Disney World, I loathe them both.

  P. J. O’Rourke is the author of books on politics, economics, and cultural commentary, including Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, and Eat the Rich.

  Anne Lamott

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Three books: one is Gypsy Boy, by Mikey Walsh; a novel, The Darlings, by Cristina Alger; and a wonderful collection of stories by Alethea Black, I Knew You’d Be Lovely, which reminds me so much of the late, great Laurie Colwin.

  When and where do you like to read?

  I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head. During the day, I read on the couch in the living room, and tend to read nonfiction or The New Yorker during this time. Then I am in bed by eleven p.m. and read for an hour or so, often a novel. Sometimes I also sneak into the guest room to read in the early evenings—although since I live alone, sneaking from room to room is just a personal preference. Reading various books at once is sort of like doing an enjoyable Stations of the Cross. I read The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle every morning in bed, then end up at the couch, possibly the guest room, and then back to bed.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, about life in a Mumbai slum. It’s nonfiction that is as riveting as a great novel—so absolutely exquisite that it made me sort of sick. I will never write anything nearly that good and accomplished. It’s the same with Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, about World War I. Just sickening. I have known him for thirty years, though, so it’s not entirely objective. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is extraordinary. After Mandela, by Douglas Foster, is exquisite, an epic work of nonfiction about South Africa’s struggle for freedom after apartheid. But he’s one of my very best friends so I’m not sure if it’s legal for me to mention it in the tiniest possible way. If I promise to get rid of him, can I include it here?

  Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction. I love memoirs, literary novels, and, secretly, legal thrillers, but could not finish the last John Grisham—we must have standards, no matter how low. My guiltiest secret is that every Thursday, I buy People magazine, Us Weekly, and the National Enquirer. If anyone asks about this, I will lie and maintain that I just said it to be funny. If people call when I am reading the Enquirer, I say, “Oh, lah de dah, I’m just lying here reading the new New Yorker.”

  What book changed your life?

  A Wrinkle in Time saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was eight years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it—in the plot, the people, and the emotional truth of their experience. This place was never a good match for me, but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.

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

  It would be my late father, Kenneth Lamott’s, nonfiction work, Anti-California: Report from Our First Parafascist State, on the years when Ronald Reagan was governor. I love the image of Barack Obama holding and reading my father’s amazing book. It would mean my father was alive again—because books are living organisms, outside of the time-space continuum.

  What is your ideal reading experience? Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  I used to love to laugh out loud—I would weep with laughter at Charles Portis or Dorothy Parker. Now 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.”

  What were your favorite books as a child? What book do you like to read to children?

  I so loved E. B. White as a child—Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web. In the ’50s when I was small, parents read their kids Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Roald Dahl; A Wrinkle in Time, E. B. White, Louisa May Alcott, and having those books read to me are some of my absolutely most precious memories. My father hated Christians, so I didn’t read the Narnia books until I was a grown-up. They’re actually brilliant. I read my son A Wrinkle in Time, E. B. White, Roald Dahl, and Harry Potter.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: Which book(s) did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

  I don’t enjoy Jonathan Franzen, although I mean to. I couldn’t finish The Corrections and thought Freedom was hilariously overrated. Maybe I am just bitter because it was such a gigantic success. I couldn’t read The Shipping News, but I pretended to love it because we had the same agent when it came out. It drove me crazy, but I later forgave the author everything for those later great, life-changing short stories.

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

  Rumi or Virginia Woolf—I love them both beyond all others. I would not be able to speak or communicate in any way while in their presence. I would sit before them, rocking autistically. There is nothing I would need to know beyond what they have written.

  What are your reading habits? Do you read paper or electronic books? Do you take notes? Have you ever written to an author?

  I’ve written to lots of writers. Laurie Colwin, after reading and foisting Happy All the Time many times. I saved her note for twenty years. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was twenty-six, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.

  I read both paper and e-books, but please don’t tell my publisher this. E-books are great for instant gratification—you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. At least I still know it is wrong. But when all is said and done, holding a printed book in my hands can be a sacred experience—the weight of the paper, the windy sound of pages turning, like a breeze. To me, a printed book is like a cathedral or a library or a beach—holy space.

  What book made you want to become a writer?

  You mean, besides Pippi Longstocking?

  Nine Stories blew me away—I can still remember reading “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” for the first time, and just weeping with the poignancy of the damaged soldier and the young girl. And “Teddy”—I still remember the moment when the little boy Teddy, who is actually a sadhu, tells the reporter on the ship that he first realized what God was all about when he saw his little sister drink a glass of milk—that it was God, pouring God, into God. Or something like that—maybe I don’t remember it quite as well as I thought. But it changed me both spiritually and as a very young writer, because both the insight and the simplicity of the story were within my reach.