By the Book (4 page)

These days kids understand fonts and italics, and computers mean that the days of literary magic are done. But back then, we had to hand-carve our own fonts … well, more or less. I did have to learn the mysteries of copy-editing symbols, when I was a young journalist.

P. L. (Pamela) Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins books, made me want to tell stories like that. Ones that seemed like they had existed forever, and were true in a way that real things that had actually happened could never be.

There were a handful of other authors who made me want to be a writer. And I think what they all had in common was that they made it look like fun. G. K. Chesterton, who delighted in painting pictures in sentences, like a child let loose with a paint box. Roger Zelazny, who reshaped myth and magic into science fiction. Harlan Ellison and Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin (although she intimidated me), and Hope Mirrlees, who only wrote one good book,
Lud-in-the-Mist
. But if you write a book that good you do not need to do it again.

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

One of mine. Preferably on a day when he gets asked a really awkward question at a press conference he'd rather not answer. So he'd distract them by going, “The economy? Bombing Iran? Wall Street? You know … I read this really great book the other day by Neil Gaiman. Has anyone here read it?
American Gods
? I mean, that scene at the end of chapter one … What the heck was going on there?”

Look, JFK made the James Bond franchise by talking about how much he liked the books. I can dream.

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

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad. I have a Kindle, somewhere, but almost never use it, and a Kindle app on my phone, my iPad, and on pretty much everything except the toaster, and I use that, because I am besotted by Kindle's ability to know where I am in a book. I've been using it to read Huge Books of the kind I always meant to read, or to finish, but didn't, because carrying them around stopped being fun. Books like
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

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

Yes.

Wait, do you think those things are exclusive? That books can only be one or the other? I would rather read a book with all of those things in it: a laughing, crying, educating, distracting book. And I would like more than that, the kind of book where the pages groan under the weight of keeping all such opposites apart.

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?

No. Perhaps because there have been few books in recent years I actually broke up with, realizing we were not right for each other. There are instead books I have stopped seeing, and vaguely intend to finish one day, the next time I run into them, but they are vaguer, more general things.

I remember the first book I didn't finish, though. It was
Mistress of Mistresses
, by E. R. Eddison. I was around seventeen, and I'd finished every book I'd started before then. It was inconceivable to me not to. I'd read and mostly enjoyed Eddison's
The Worm Ouroboros
, a fantasy epic written in a lush, thick, cod-Elizabethan style that started off irritating and then became part of the fun. I bought
Mistress of Mistresses
and abandoned it a third of the way through. It was gloriously liberating, the idea that I didn't have to finish every book.

But mostly, I did. If I started it, I'd read it to the end: until I found myself a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the UK, and obliged to read every science-fiction book published in the UK in the year of eligibility. I was a judge for two years. The first year, I read everything. The second year, I read a lot of first chapters and took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter.

Then I'd go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?

As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

He was a sui generis writer, the oddest and most frustratingly delightful of American tall-tale tellers. Not a lot of people have read him, and even fewer like what he wrote, but those of us who like him like him all the way. We never met.

The last time I wrote to Lafferty, he had Alzheimer's and was in a home in Oklahoma, shortly before his death, and I do not believe he read or understood the letter, but it made me feel like I was doing something right by writing it and sending it.

What's the best comic book you've ever read? Graphic novel?

Ow. That's hard. I think I love Eddie Campbell's
ALEC: The Years Have Pants
best of everything, but it's a hard call.

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's
From Hell
is pretty wonderful, after all.
Watchmen
had a bigger influence on me than anything else, reading and rereading it a comic at a time as it was published, as did the
High Society
and
Church and State
sequences of Dave Sim's Cerebus.

And Will Eisner's The Spirit is funny and sad, educational and entertaining (read the books, ignore the movie).

I'm about to start building giant lists of comics and graphic novels here, so I will stop. (Quick! Read anything by Lynda Barry!)

There. I stopped.

What do you plan to read next?

The Night Circus
, by Erin Morgenstern. I have so many proof copies of the book, given to me by people certain that if I read it I would love it, that I feel guilty. They stare at me from all over the house. I resisted when Audrey Niffenegger told me I had to read it, but when my daughter Holly told me how much she loved it, I knew I would have to succumb.

Neil Gaiman
is the author of
Coraline
,
The Graveyard Book
,
Odd and the Frost Giants
,
The Wolves in the Walls,
and
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
, among other books.

 

The Gift of a Book

When I was nine, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was ten. My mother got them from a mail-order catalog. We weren't a household that owned many books so it was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That's just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That's when I became enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too, as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine,
Jane Eyre
without the embarrassing bits.)

—
Hilary Mantel

Gender Outlaw
, by Kate Bornstein. I got it for my birthday last year from my daughter after a family discussion on the merits of transgender surgery. It's a fascinating and illuminating memoir by a transgender playwright.

—
Caroline Kennedy

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.

—
Jonathan Franzen

I'm not currently teaching, but it's a wonderful feeling when a former student gets a book published and sends me a copy. This happened last year with a woman named Bianca Zander, whose terrific first novel is called
The Girl Below
. It's about a young woman who returns to London after a decade in New Zealand and confronts strange events from her past

—
Curtis Sittenfeld

Peter the Great
, by Robert Massie. It kicked off my obsession with Russian history.

—
Jeannette Walls

Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago—a book that in many ways changed my life. Almost twenty years ago, I was halfway through writing my first novel,
Digital Fortress
, when I was given a copy of
Writing the Blockbuster Novel
, by the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman. His book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. Two months ago, by chance, I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me write
Digital Fortress
. He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write
The Da Vinci Code
.

—
Dan Brown

On December 7, 1999, I left the bedside of my editor Faith Sale, just before she was removed from life support. We had been like sisters. Two hours later, Stephen King called and asked my husband, Lou, and me to meet him at his hotel room. It was his first public foray after being nearly killed by a van six months before. He gave me an advance reading copy of
On Writing
. A couple of years before, we had talked about the question no one asks us in interviews: language. He had been thinking of doing a book on writing, and I had said, “Do it.” He now asked me to look at the dedication. It was for me. We then went to see the premiere of
The Green Mile
, about a man on death row who can heal people, including those dying of cancer. That night was both enormously sad and gloriously uplifting.

—
Amy Tan

Mary Higgins Clark

What book is on your night stand now?

Dante to
Dead Man Walking
: One Reader's Journey Through the Christian Classics
, by Raymond A. Schroth.

When and where do you like to read?

I like to read anywhere. I never go to a doctor or dentist without a book in my bag. At home I used to love to read in bed but fall asleep too easily. So my favorite spot is a roomy wing chair with a footstool in the family room. If I'm working on my own book, I'll be reading background material in my third-floor office at home in Saddle River.

What was the last truly great book you read?

After many years, I just reread
Pride and Prejudice
and understand why it is, and always will be, a classic.

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

Fiction or nonfiction: honestly, both. I love to read historical biographies, and of course I cut my teeth on suspense, starting with
The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May
, in which an infant is left on the doorstep. The babysitter had been in a daze because a can of tomato soup had fallen on her head, and she keeps trying to steal the baby back. After that it was the Nancy Drew series, and I was hooked.

You once worked as a stewardess, and presumably you have traveled quite a bit. Any observations about what people read on airplanes and how that's changed over the years? What do you like to read on the plane?

When I was a flight stewardess with Pan American a thousand years ago, everyone was carrying a book. Now everyone seems to be carrying a computer or looking at the television. A few years ago, I got on the plane and smiled to see a woman deeply engrossed in one of my books. I settled myself and a few minutes later glanced back. She was in a dead sleep. On a plane, I like to catch up with what my suspense writer friends are up to and grab their latest on the way to the plane.

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

The Constitution, with emphasis on the First Amendment.

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 want to be emotionally involved with the characters, to laugh or cry with them, to yearn for things to turn out right for them. I don't think there is any book that can't teach you something, even if it is how not to tell a story.

What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

The Good Earth
,
A Girl of the Limberlost
,
The Secret Garden
,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. Favorite character was Jane Eyre after I saw the first movie and before I read the book.