By the Book (16 page)

Do you like reading poetry?

Yes, I do, but 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.

Mythology has often played a role in your fiction. Is there any myth in particular that's especially meaningful to you? Or that you just like rereading?

Hard to pick. Tyr willingly sacrificing his arm in the jaws of Fenris the wolf. Daedalus and Icarus. Jacob wrestling with the angel.

You can suggest three books to a literary snob who believes genre fiction has no merit. What's on the list?

The Turn of the Screw
.
Heart of Darkness
.
Blood Meridian
.

Is there any genre you'd be afraid of trying to tackle yourself?

SpongeBob/Patrick fanfic.

You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?

Moby-Dick
,
Ulysses
, and
How to Build a Working Airplane Out of Coconuts
.

What do you plan to read next?

Beyond Black
, by Hilary Mantel. And
Diamonds Are Forever
.

Michael Chabon
is the author of
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
,
Wonder Boys
,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
,
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
, and
Telegraph Avenue
, among other books.

 

The Ideal Reading Experience

Rain creates a Pavlovian response in me to relax with a good book. I find that peace at our beach house, and created a cozy nook just for that purpose. I admit that I am driven to work and have to remind myself that reading is not an indulgence or a luxury. I have to improve that aspect of my life.

—
Bryan Cranston

I probably shouldn't admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books. I travel with an iPad, but at home I like holding a book open and being able to leaf through it, highlight with a real yellow pen, and dog-ear important pages. After I finish a book, I'll often look to see how many page corners are turned down as one gauge of how much I liked it. I tried the Kindle app for the iPad on the elliptical, but when you get sweaty, you can't turn the pages.

—
Sheryl Sandberg

The most pleasurable reading experience I've had recently was just last week—jogging on the beach with an audiobook of Malcolm Gladwell's
What the Dog Saw
. I was so engrossed in his essay “The Ketchup Conundrum” that I ran an extra mile just to find out how it ended.

—
Dan Brown

I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp, and two dogs to keep me warm. I confess that I am a messy, disorganized, and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first forty pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.

—
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.”