By the Book (5 page)

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't?

Honestly not fair to answer. If I start a book that I'm supposed to like and don't like, I put it down. Maybe if I gave it a longer shot I might have loved it. We'll never know.

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?

For years I admired Morris West from afar. Then I met him briefly at a cocktail party. His agent, a personal friend of mine, called the next morning: “Mary, where did you go? After the cocktails, Morris said, ‘Let's collect Mary Clark and go to dinner.'” I wanted to kill myself. I had slipped away to a teacher's retirement dinner. But later, on a publicity trip to Australia, I visited him and his family at home. Years later he asked me for a blurb for his new book. I was thrilled.

What are your reading habits? Are you a fast or slow reader? Do you take notes? Do you read print or electronic?

I'm a fast reader. I only take notes if it's for research purposes. I love the convenience of electronic, especially when I'm traveling, but love best the feel and smell of a print book.

What book made you want to become a writer?

I was writing from the time I could put words in a sentence. My one gift has been to be a storyteller.

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

That would be like asking me which of my children is my favorite.

What's your favorite movie based on one of your books?

Sadly, I'm still waiting.

What's the best suspense novel you've ever read?

The Woman in White
, by Wilkie Collins. Runner-up,
Rebecca
, by Daphne du Maurier.

What do you plan to read next?

The latest P. D. James. She's a marvelous writer and at age ninety-one gives me hope for my own future of continuing to be a storyteller.

Mary Higgins Clark
has written suspense novels, collections of short stories, a historical novel, children's books, and a memoir
.

 

I'd Love to Host a Literary Dinner Party With …

José Martí, because he lived so many lives and because he was such a fantastic writer and because, damn it, he was José Martí (he also lived in the New York City area, so that will help the conversation). Octavia Butler because she's my personal hero, helped give the African diaspora a future (albeit a future nearly as dark as our past), and because I'd love to see her again. And Arundhati Roy because I'm still crushing on her mind and on
The God of Small Things
.

—
Junot Díaz

Sappho, for a bit of ancient gender politics; Aphra Behn for theater gossip; and George Eliot because everyone who knew her said she was fascinating. All women, because they know how to get talking about the nitty-gritty so quickly and are less prone to telling anecdotes. I'd have gone for Jane Austen if I weren't convinced she'd just have a soft-boiled egg and leave early.

—
Emma Thompson

Well, I eat dinner with writers a lot, and—like eating with children—the experience can really go both ways. I'd probably make it potluck, and then invite the best cooks who are (or were) also good company. If you were to assign writers an Invitability Score (prose style × kitchen chops × congeniality at the table), Ben Marcus (
The Flame Alphabet
) is always going to rate pretty high.

—
Michael Chabon

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.

—
Jeffrey Eugenides

I know I should use my time machine to go deep-canonical, but the prospect of trying to navigate a dinner party with Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, and Honoré de Balzac—figuring out what I could say to them, or what they could say to each other—is beyond my capacities as a bon vivant. Instead, I think I'd want to hang out with three guys I just missed out on knowing, a group more “relatable” to twentieth-century me—Don Carpenter, Philip K. Dick, and Malcolm Braly. They're all, as it happens, semi-outlaw types with Marin County connections, so they'd probably have a good time if thrown together. And I could flatter myself and claim I've been implicated in the revival of each of their posthumous careers, so we'd have something to raise a glass or spark a joint to. I'd be thrilled to let them know they're in print.

—
Jonathan Lethem

Drew Gilpin Faust

What book is on your night stand now?

Alan Hollinghurst's
The Stranger's Child
, Daniel Kahneman's
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, Katherine Boo's
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
,
The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It
(Library of America). I always seem to be reading several books at once.

Where and when do you like to read?

Everywhere and anywhere—but always at night before I go to sleep.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Not having read
Huckleberry Finn
since high school, I returned to it last summer—ordering it on my Kindle on a bit of a whim. I was astonished to find how much of what I had been teaching and studying about race and slavery in American history was already there in a book published in 1884. The book offers as well striking—and eerily modern, or perhaps postmodern in their critical renderings of “reality”—insights into the masks and dissimulations that structure social order.

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

Both. I am a historian, so of course I read history. But now as Harvard president I have license and reason to read across the fields represented at the university. I also enjoy contemporary fiction, and I am a detective story addict.

My responsibilities as president include international travel, and for me, trip planning always includes reading. I have recently been immersed in books about India, which I visited in January. I have explored both fiction and nonfiction: current affairs, history, art and architecture, and some wonderful novels—Mistry, Desai, Rushdie, Ghosh.

What was the best book you read as a student?

Albert Camus's
La Peste—The Plague—
had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from
La Peste
. For a student during the 1960s, existentialism's emphasis on meaning as the product of action and engagement was very alluring.

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

I have always loved animals, and as a child, I read a lot of horse books. I had a particular favorite called
Silver Snaffles
that my mother gave away. I looked for a copy for decades and won't soon forget the excitement I felt when I saw its familiar blue cover across the room in a bookcase of children's literature in G. Heywood Hill's legendary rare-book store in London just a few years ago. Now it is mine once again.

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?

Emily Dickinson. She is such a puzzle. Her startling genius seems to have come from nowhere. She lived her life as a recluse; her work remained essentially unpublished and undiscovered until well after her death. Yet she turned language and poetry on end.

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

I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle—for travel and for procuring a book in seconds.

What is the best book you've read about academia? Or a book that prepared you for academic life in some way?

Amanda Cross's murderous take on academic life has provided me with a great deal of pleasure.

In a more serious vein, I much admire Clark Kerr's
The Uses of the University
, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard in 1963 and has been amplified in several editions since. It remains the best explanation of how the American research university emerged and evolved, and why its commitment to the critical perspective and the long view is so important to our present and future.

Is there any book you wish all incoming freshmen at Harvard would read?

Kathryn Schulz's
Being Wrong
advocates doubt as a skill and praises error as the foundation of wisdom. Her book would reinforce my encouragement of Harvard's accomplished and successful freshmen to embrace risk and even failure.

What do you plan to read next?

After I finish the pile on my night stand, I may take up Karl Marlantes's
What It Is Like to Go to War
. My curiosity about that question has animated a great deal of my own research and writing about the Civil War. Ernest Hemingway once declared that war “is the best subject.” It is certainly one that has engaged me as both author and reader.

Drew Gilpin Faust
is the president of Harvard University and the author of
Mothers of Invention
, among other books.

 

Guilty Pleasures

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.

—
Neil Gaiman

Books about the Inquisition and the Crusades are a guilty pleasure because I feel guilty reading bad things about the Catholic Church—though it's hard to avoid these days. Biographies of famous horses and lives of the saints are among my favorite literary genres.

—
Caroline Kennedy

Listening to the British audio versions of the Harry Potter books. They're read by the great Stephen Fry, and I play them over and over, like an eight-year-old.

—
David Sedaris

Spiritually leaning self-help is obviously my guilty pleasure (not that guilty: I like Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, and especially Mark Epstein's Buddhist psychology books). I also like extremely speculative books in which psychics explain what happens before we're born/after we die (Sylvia Browne, master psychic).

—
Lena Dunham

My (very) guilty pleasure is tabloid journalism. I hate to say it, but I know the names of all the celebrities' babies.

—
Elizabeth Gilbert

I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.

—
Ira Glass

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.

—
Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

—
P. J. O'Rourke

When I was a teenager my guilty reading was, of course, erotic stuff. At fourteen, living in Lebanon, I discovered the irresistible mixture of eroticism and fantasy reading
One Thousand and One Nights
inside a closet with a flashlight. Nothing can be compared to the excitement of a forbidden book. Today nothing is forbidden to me, so there is no guilt. Too bad!