By the Book (20 page)

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, dead 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.

Oh, and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and “Down at the Dinghy,” with the great Boo Boo Glass. And “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”—don't even get me started.…

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

I guess I like
Operating Instructions
,
Bird by Bird
, and
Traveling Mercies
the most, because they have helped people the most.

What's the best memoir you've ever read?

I loved
The Seven Storey Mountain
, by Thomas Merton. Nabokov's
Speak, Memory
is pretty great.

What do you plan to read next?

Ann Patchett's
State of Wonder
. I am about to head out on book tour, and this book seems like an ideal blend of highly intelligent and readable. The only problem is going to be all those snakes. Maybe there is a redacted snake-free edition.

Anne Lamott
is the author of many books, including
Operating Instructions
,
Bird by Bird
,
Traveling Mercies
,
Some Assembly Required
, and
Help, Thanks, Wow
.

Ian McEwan

What's the best book you've read so far this year?

Stephen Sedley's
Ashes and Sparks
. Sedley was a senior judge in our court of appeal until last year and in this collection of essays he writes on a range of issues that concern the individual and the state. He belongs, as one commentator noted, to the English tradition of radical nonconformism—the title is taken from a seventeenth-century Leveller pamphlet. But you could have no interest in the law and read his book for pure intellectual delight, for the exquisite, finely balanced prose, the prickly humor, the knack of artful quotation, and an astonishing historical grasp. A novelist could be jealous.

And what was the last truly great book you read?