By the Book (30 page)

In the bathroom?

I don't need to read in the bathroom; it takes me less than a minute.

And on your coffee tables?

Art and photography books, illustrated poems by Pablo Neruda, fancy editions of
The Divine Comedy
and of Pedro de Valdivia's letters to the king of Spain (he conquered Chile in 1542), etc. All for show. No one reads that stuff.

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?

Yes, I remember perfectly, but I won't tell because I don't want to offend the author. I would hate it if someone did that to me.

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

I would love to meet Mark Twain. What a character! I imagine him larger than life, sexy, handsome, full of energy, a grandiose storyteller, a fantastic liar, and a man of heart and principles. I would not ask him anything in particular; I would try to get him a little drunk (it should be easy) and then sit at his feet to listen to his stories.

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

Zorro, of course. If possible, at night and in bed, with the mask but not the whip.

What do you plan to read next?

I just started
The Patrick Melrose Novels
, by Edward St. Aubyn, because everyone is talking about it. (However, that was not the case with
Fifty Shades of Grey
; I am too old for bondage.) This book has 680 pages. It will take me a while to start another one … unless I get acute hepatitis. But on my night table is
Tenth of December
, by George Saunders, waiting its turn.

Isabel Allende
is the author of
The House of the Spirits
,
Eva Luna
, and
The Island Beneath the Sea
, among other works.

Anna Quindlen

What's your favorite book of all time?

That is so exactly like being asked which is your favorite child.
Middlemarch
, because I think of it as perfection, although I am not as enamored of Eliot's other work?
Bleak House
, because I've learned so much from all of Dickens?
Pride and Prejudice
, because I'm thoroughly satisfied every time I finish? Too tough to declare a winner.

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

I can read almost anywhere: subway, plane, car (although not while I myself am driving). But I have a big chair with an ottoman in a corner off the living room, and that's probably where I like to read best, usually in the evenings, sometimes on paper, sometimes on iPad. I acquired that chair specifically for purposes of reading and the little table next to it specifically for the putting down of a book.

Who are your favorite novelists?

Dickens, Austen, Wharton, Faulkner. Among living people, Alice McDermott, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks. I also really like Theodore Dreiser and Ford Madox Ford and John Galsworthy. It's sad, the excellent people who have fallen out of fashion. You always hope they'll fall back in again.

What are the best books you've read by women journalists?

It would be impossible to answer that question at this moment without starting with Kate Boo's
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
, which is flawless. When I was on book tour last year I talked about it more than my own book. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's
Random Family
is one of the best books I've ever read about what it's like to be poor in America. I never miss Laura Lippman's novels. She was a reporter at
The Baltimore Sun
. She still has a reporter's eye. Last year Julia Keller, who was at the
Chicago Tribune
, published a mystery set in West Virginia called
A Killing in the Hills
. It made me want to read her next one.

Who are your favorite women writing today?

There are some women writing terrific novels that pass as crime fiction but transcend the genre. I buy a new Denise Mina, Tana French, or Kate Atkinson the moment it appears. Hilary Mantel is finally getting the genuflection she deserves. But there are some women whose backlists should be read by everyone. Mary Wesley should be much better known in the United States than she is.

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

I think “experimental fiction” is a synonym for “Give me a break,” and I've never been able to warm to sci-fi. Other than that, I'm an omnivore.

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

A pretty full set of Georgette Heyer. Which, by the way, no one should find surprising. Literary snobbery has it that Heyer wrote standard-issue bodice rippers, but the truth is, her Regency novels are well-crafted escapism, potato chips for the soul. If you liked
Downton Abbey
, you will love Georgette Heyer.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

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.

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

One of the first copies of
Heavy Metal and You
, by Christopher Krovatin.

What book has had the greatest impact on you?

Oh, such a Miss America answer: the Bible. I grew up Catholic, and it's hard to separate the New Testament from all my aspirations, inspiration, and political positions. I'm a liberal because of the Sermon on the Mount.

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

The Best and the Brightest
, by David Halberstam. Smart people make bad decisions about policy and then compound them by refusing to admit they were wrong. I wish George W. Bush had read it before invading Iraq.

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

We had a family friend who owned hundreds of books and had them set up on shelves, library style, in her basement. She is the person who introduced me to
A Girl of the Limberlost
,
Anne of Green Gables
, and the Betsy-Tacy series. I used to go down those steps as though I was entering the US Mint.

Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

Jo March in
Little Women
. She wanted to be a writer, she became a writer. She stopped caring that she wasn't pretty. She sold her hair to send her mother to visit their father during the Civil War. I even forgave her for not marrying Laurie.

What books are on your coffee table?

Stephen Sondheim's two-volume memoir/writing primer/musical theater guide,
Finishing the Hat
and
Look, I Made a Hat
. I listen to Sondheim all the time while I'm writing.

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?

There are books you outgrow and shouldn't revisit. Let them remain frozen in the amber of adolescence.
The Catcher in the Rye
seems genius when you're fifteen, and when you're thirty-five—not so much. I thought Ayn Rand was amazing when I was in high school, and now the only thing I find amazing is that I ever felt that way. As for the putting down part, I think I will pass. No less an eminence than Philip Roth has told us that writing is frustrating and humiliating. No one needs to be humiliated further by reading in the
Times
that someone chucked her book after three chapters.

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

That way lies disaster. Books are writers' way of becoming something else, something more, something greater. It might be that dinner with Dickens would be a disappointment. I've met some living writers who were just like their books, wonderfully, and others who ruined their books for me by being pompous and self-obsessed.

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

Elizabeth Bennet. We would be buds for sure, power-walking the grounds of Pemberley. And I would get to hang out with Darcy.

What do you plan to read next?

There's a new Kate Atkinson!

Anna Quindlen
is the author of novels and nonfiction works including
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
,
Object Lessons
,
Still Life with Breadcrumbs
, and
One True Thing
.

Jonathan Franzen

What's the best book you read in the last year?

I loved Rachel Kushner's
Flamethrowers
. I also have to mention Mario Vargas Llosa's
War of the End of the World
and Milan Kundera's
Unbearable Lightness of Being
.

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

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. Conversely, on an even worse pair of flights, from Zagreb to New York by way of two London airports, I'd carefully saved
The Custom of the Country
, and it kept me engrossed the entire way. I finished it in the taxi line at JFK, feeling bottomlessly grateful to Edith Wharton.

What German authors are you currently reading?

I'm reading the extremely funny Thomas Brussig, who unfortunately isn't translated into English. Last year I was reading Karl Kraus for the translations of his work that I'm publishing in the fall. Kraus was Viennese, but his language, of course, was German.

Are there particular kinds of stories you're drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

I like fiction by writers engaged in trying to make sense of their lives and of the world in which they find themselves, writers who palpably have skin in the game, and this makes me particularly resistant to historical fiction. And yet some of my all-time favorite novels are historical—
The Greenlanders
(Jane Smiley),
The Blue Flower
(Penelope Fitzgerald), and
War and Peace
. It took some perseverance to get into
The War of the End of the World
, which is about the brutal suppression of a rebellion in late-nineteenth-century Brazil, but once I was into it I was harrowed as I've been by few other novels. The suffering and violence and death in it became, in a sense, my own. I thought it was magnificent.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

I guess we shouldn't count Freud, although I have felt helped by him. I also remember feeling helped, at least momentarily, by Harriet Lerner's
Dance of Anger
at a dark moment in my early thirties. It's the rare self-help book that acknowledges the true difficulty of helping the self.

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

A copy of
Libra
, with a nice inscription, that Don DeLillo sent me in 1989. I must have asked my publisher to send him a finished copy of my first novel; there's no way to explain the gift otherwise. But after spending my twenties working in near-total isolation and revering DeLillo from afar, I couldn't believe that I had something signed to me in his own human hand. At some level, I still can't believe it.