By the Book (23 page)

But I have to say that Karl May wrote my favorite stories. He was a German who had never seen a real cowboy or Indian, but somehow he wrote fantastic stories about this wise Apache chief named Winnetou and his cowboy friend Old Shatterhand. The stories taught me a powerful lesson about getting along despite differences, but more importantly, they opened up my world and gave me a window to see America. I still don't understand how Karl May was able to paint such an incredible picture of something he had never seen, but I do know that the cowboy stories immediately captured my attention and made me interested to learn everything I could about America.

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

Winston Churchill. He is one of my heroes, and when I look at all of the books he somehow had time to write, it just blows my mind. To be such a vital figure in modern history and at the same time write incredible history … I would love to talk to him about how he had time to be great as a leader and as a writer. If there is one person who shows us the power of history, it has to be him. It's an old cliché that history repeats himself, but when you read Churchill's speeches attacking the idea of appeasing Hitler or warning about the Cold War, you realize how brilliant he was. He was ahead of the game, which is a funny thing to say about someone who spent his spare time writing and researching history.

What's the best movie based on a book you've seen recently?

I love everything about the Harry Potter franchise. You have an incredible, epic journey with amazing characters that I think plays just as well on the screen as it does on the page. But I'm also a sucker for a major success story, and it is very difficult to match J. K. Rowling in that category. Talk about inspiration: to go from being a struggling single parent to where she is today, it's just incredible. I love to hear stories like that, and her personal story is as epic as the stories she wrote about Harry Potter.

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

One of my favorite characters in history is Cincinnatus, and I've read everything I can find about him. I would love to play him in a film about ancient Rome. He was given the keys to the kingdom—pure, absolute power!—and he did the job and then went back to his farm. He didn't get drunk on the power. He did the job he was asked to do, dealt with the invasion, and walked away. That is the purest form of public service I can imagine, and it would be fun to try to capture that character on film.

The United States was lucky to have George Washington as a founding father, because he had that same civic virtue, and of course he had read about and admired Cincinnatus.

Arnold Schwarzenegger
served as governor of California from 2003 to 2011. Before that, he was an actor and a champion bodybuilder. He is the author of the memoir
Total Recall
, among other books.

Francine Prose

What book is on your night stand now?

A volume of Brassaï photographs. Alain-Fournier's
Le Grand Meaulnes
(the new translation calls it
The Lost Estate
). And
Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives
, by Jose Rodriguez.

When and where do you like to read?

The passenger seat of a car on the New York State Thruway, on a sunny day without much traffic.

What was the last truly great book you read? Do you remember the last time you said to someone, “You absolutely must read this book”?

A year after reading it, I'm still urging people to read Peter Nadas's dense, filthy, brilliant 1,100-page novel,
Parallel Stories
. I've told lots of people to read Mavis Gallant's stories; Jo Ann Beard's
In Zanesville
;
A Chronology
, a collection of Diane Arbus's writings; and Mark Strand's recent book of prose poems,
Almost Invisible
.

Do you consider yourself a fiction or a nonfiction person? Any guilty pleasures?

I consider myself a sentence person. Really guilty pleasures? Skimming memoirs by writers I know for gossip about people I know.

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

One Hundred Years of Solitude
convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my PhD program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel García Márquez.

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

The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program
, by Larry Siems, head of PEN American Center's Freedom to Write Program. But since the president probably already knows what's in it, I'd suggest he read
The Complete Stories of Anton Chekhov
. Chekhov helps you imagine what it's like to be someone else, a useful skill for a political leader.

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

Distract me. I cry enough. Though some books I love—Mrs. Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, Kosztolanyi's
Skylark
—are almost unbearably sad. Books make me laugh out loud so rarely I remember the ones that have: Hunter Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. Iris Owens's
After Claude
. Geoff Dyer's
Zona
. Here's a funny bit from Jess Walter's novel
Beautiful Ruins
, another book I have been telling friends to read: “The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections that have caused a seventy-two-year-old man to have the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.”

What were your favorite books as a child? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

Mary Poppins
.
The Borrowers
.
The Martian Chronicles
.
Little Women
. The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. I was a very early reader with a child's ability to slip back and forth between fantasy and reality—and an intermittent inability to tell the difference. I lived inside those books. Their characters were my friends, especially the melancholy exile Earthlings on Mars. I was always disappointed to find myself back in my room.

I wish all children (American or not) would read large-print versions of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. James Marshall, William Steig, and Maurice Sendak are gods of the picture book. Parents, check out Marshall's
The Stupids
and Steig's
The Amazing Bone
.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I read ten pages of Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
, then put it down (forever) and went to see if there was anything good to eat. Whenever I admit I can't read Trollope, some helpful person suggests the one Trollope novel I should try, and I always promise to try, even if I already have.

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

People seem to like
Blue Angel
. I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia. Like most writers, I assume, my favorite is the novel I'm working on now. It's called
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
. I can still get lost in it. I have to, in order to write it.

Do you remember the last book someone personally recommended that you read and enjoyed? Who recommended you read it and what convinced you to pick it up?

My husband read aloud so much of
Parallel Stories
that I figured I might as well finish the rest. It was as good as he promised, and we were both glad to have someone to talk to about this crazy book. Marriage counselors should advise client couples to read extremely long, difficult, bizarrely entertaining Hungarian novels.

What's the one book you wish someone else would write?

The poet Charles Simic says there should be a book called
The History of Stupidity
. He says it would be the world's longest book: an encyclopedia. I don't think he plans to write it, but I wish that someone would.

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

Isaac Bashevis Singer said something like, “If Tolstoy lived across the street, I wouldn't go meet him.” I know what he meant about Tolstoy, but I'd like to live across the street from Jane Bowles, Robert Walser, Gogol, Kafka, or Heinrich von Kleist. Or maybe at the Spanish campground where Roberto Bolaño worked as a watchman.

What do you plan to read next?

Jonathan Dee's
A Thousand Pardons
, which I just received in galleys. Maybe I'll read it next, or maybe I'll save it for when I really need it: in the dentist's waiting room or on a long airplane trip.

Francine Prose
is the author of many books, including
Lovers at the Chameleon Club
,
Paris 1932; A Changed Man;
Blue Angel;
Anne Frank;
and
Reading Like a Writer
.

 

On Not Having Read

I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen
The Big Lebowski
. Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.

—
Malcolm Gladwell

I'm looking at Shelby Foote's three-volume history of the Civil War on my shelf—somehow I've never managed to read the whole thing. And I've never read most of the novels of Thomas Hardy, although I don't feel embarrassed about it. Even though I love a lot of his poetry, his novels are just too sad for me.

—
Donna Tartt

In the matter of putting things down unfinished, I'm too old now not to do it all the time, when something's not working. No harm, no foul, just mutual détente. As for the classics unread, in that too I try to leave shame out of my game. The existence of vastly more great books than I can ever hope to read is a primary locus of joy in this life, and weight on the scale in favor of human civilization.

—
Jonathan Lethem

Ah yes, David Lodge's Humiliation game. I'd be champion at that. There are so many, but I'll say
War and Peace
.

—
Richard Dawkins

Moby-Dick
.

—
Andrew Solomon

Dickens's
Bleak House
. What's wrong with me? On the other hand, I finished
Middlemarch
! So lay off me.

—
Gary Shteyngart

I've never read the great Russian writers. Fact is, I just don't have any great interest in Russia or Russian culture or Russian history. None at all. Who knows why. I suppose we're all allowed to be dumb here once or twice.

—
James McBride

War and Peace
. My standard excuse for this appalling illiteracy is: “I'm saving it for my final illness.” But when the doctors tell me I have six months to live, I wonder: Will I really reach for
War and Peace
instead of P. G. Wodehouse?

—
Christopher Buckley

Jared Diamond