By the Book Read online

  —Isabel Allende

  My husband is a streamliner; I am a pack rat. I’ve even hung on to all my textbooks from college—you know, just in case I have the sudden urge to read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.

  —Sheryl Sandberg

  We had it organized by topic for nonfiction and alphabetically by author for fiction and poetry—but then the ceiling leaked and we had to paint the rooms and now it’s every book for itself.

  —Caroline Kennedy

  Reference books in the dining room, older books needing and deserving protection in bookcases in the living room, theology and philosophy on shelves in the bedroom, classical and ancient Near Eastern literature in the study, modern history and Americana in the room that has only bookshelves in it, unclassifiable books in stacks on the stairs.

  —Marilynne Robinson

  I am proud to say that I give away or sell at little to no profit almost all of my books. I have mentioned a few favorites earlier, but as a rule I don’t believe in keeping books. After I have read, reread, and reread a book it seems sinful to keep such a reservoir of fun and knowledge fallow on a shelf. Books are meant to be read, and if I’m not reading them then someone else should get the opportunity.

  —Walter Mosley

  * * *

  Sylvia Nasar

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Two biographies of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope’s mother; an Elizabeth Gaskell novel; and E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady. Some Cold War history.

  When and where do you like to read?

  In bed and in the car. I read page turners in bed and listen to more challenging books in the car.

  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”?

  The Widow Barnaby, by Frances Trollope, a deliciously witty satire about a vulgar, heartless, outrageously flirtatious widow of a village pharmacist who poses as a lady of great fortune. Beribboned and bedizened, Martha Barnaby drags her beautiful but penniless niece from watering hole to watering hole in her hunt for a rich second husband. The angelic Agnes dutifully complies when forced to wear the same hideous black gown every day for months, while acting as her aunt’s personal maid. And I loved Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, about two aging lovers whom children and relatives try to boss around.

  Do you consider yourself a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  Before I wrote A Beautiful Mind, I never read anything but novels and plays for pleasure. For the next fifteen years I’ve mostly read history, biography, and economics. But when I was finishing Grand Pursuit I got into novels again.

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

  I haven’t thought about O. Henry in years, but I suppose his stories had a great influence on me. Also, Agatha Christie. Until I actually did it, I never had the idea of writing a book. I was particularly inspired by Nora, by Brenda Maddox, the biography of James Joyce’s wife, and The Man Who Knew Infinity, about Ramanujan, the Indian mathematical genius, by Robert Kanigel.

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

  Grand Pursuit, of course.

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

  I love buying (cheap) first editions of books I use for research. I didn’t see the point of a Kindle until my friend Trish Evans pointed out that I could carry the collected works of every nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writer with me. Being able to travel with an entire library is amazing.

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

  I like books that make me do both, which is one reason I adore Victorian fiction. All English novelists, it seems, have a deliciously wicked sense of humor, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë. I do also like novelists like Tolstoy who combine strong plots with philosophical or political musings.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

  Grimms’ fairy tales. My favorite was “The Bremen Town Musicians,” about a dog, cat, donkey, and rooster, all over the hill, who learn that they are about to be discarded or worse. They decide to take matters into their own hands. I made my mother and grandmother read it to me so often that I could recite the whole story word for word.

  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?

  The Marriage Plot, by Jeff Eugenides, and The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst. I’d heard Jeff Eugenides on NPR and immediately wanted to read his novel. I adored the first two Hollinghursts. But I found both of these novels somewhat cold and inanimate. That said, there are so many books that I wasn’t able to appreciate until I’d made two or three tries—Middlemarch, for example, or Swann’s Way—and these may fall into that category. Reading is so contextual, like wine.

  What’s the best book about economics you’ve ever read? The worst?

  There are so many great ones, but these are exquisite: John Maynard Keynes, by Robert Skidelsky. Bankers and Pashas, by David Landes. The House of Rothschild, by Niall Ferguson. Economic Sentiments, by Emma Rothschild. Poverty and Compassion, by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

  Worst? To be worst it would have to have had a wide following, because otherwise who cares? I suppose Das Kapital, by Marx; The Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels; and Mein Kampf, by Hitler.

  If somebody walked in on you writing one of your books, what would they see? What does your work space look like?

  Painted woodwork; tiled fireplace; a 1920s art-glass fixture; a ten-foot-long desk; nineteenth-century paintings of lighthouses and railroads; old globes; books, of course; and through the windows, my garden, currently a riot of orange and salmon-colored tulips and pink and white viburnums. I can look up and see whether I’m about to miss the garbage collection or Emma, the Labrador, is chasing the neighbor’s cat.

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

  Victoria Klein, my Anglophile interior designer friend, gave me The Widow Barnaby. Trish Evans, my Australian publicist/novelist best friend, introduced me to the Provincial Lady series, her favorites as a young girl. Christopher Potter, a London editor and writer friend, gave me Cold Comfort Farm and The Diary of a Nobody the Christmas before last. And Avinash Dixit, the Princeton economist, turned me on to P. G. Wodehouse and Patrick O’Brian. What convinced me? They all have slightly eccentric tastes and highly developed senses of humor, and they talk about books all the time.

  Is there a book you wish you could write, but feel as if you can’t or never will?

  I’d love to write biographies of Frances Trollope; Elizabeth Gaskell; E. M. Delafield; Wilkie Collins; Frank Ramsey; John von Neumann; S. S. Chern and other Chinese and Japanese mathematical émigrés; Paul Krugman; and my father—as well as books about Cold War spies, the 1940s German economic miracle, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, medical hoaxes, do-gooders behaving badly. I hope to write more books, but since I’m always discovering new enthusiasms, I doubt I will be writing them all.

  What is your favorite book to teach or otherwise ask your students of journalism to read?

  Den of Thieves, by James B. Stewart; Globalization: The Irrational Fear That Someone in China Will Take Your Job, by Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn; An Hour Before Daylight, by Jimmy Carter; Economics, by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells.

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

  A great biography of John von Neumann, the most important mathematician of the twentie
th century.

  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?

  Henry James is my idea of the perfect friend. He was a brilliant talker, journalist, traveler, gardener, decorator, correspondent, as well as my favorite writer. He is not primarily an intellectual like Proust or Tolstoy, deeply interested in abstract ideas, but he is much warmer, sensitive and compassionate. I did write to an author once, but her reply was so chilly that I never did it again.

  What do you plan to read next?

  Anna Karenina.

  Sylvia Nasar is the author of A Beautiful Mind and Grand Pursuit. She teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

  Ira Glass

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Everything I’m reading right now is homework of one sort or another. That’s pretty typical. I’m jumping around like a grad student, writing a paper on Mary Wingerd’s history, North Country: The Making of Minnesota, for this big story we’re doing on the show about the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

  I just finished the manuscript of the new book Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish, a Novel, by David Rakoff. It’s a rhyming “novel,” very funny and very sad, which is my favorite combination.

  Were there any books that helped with the process of making your new movie?

  I just got a copy of the screenwriting manual Save the Cat! to fact-check a thing I’m hoping to talk about while promoting this film we’re putting out this month.

  And I’m rereading Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder. I first read it over a decade ago when screenwriters and studios started trying to convert stories from our show into films, and I was trying to understand the storytelling tricks you can use in a movie. I’m sure people who study film in school would have a different perspective, but for someone like me who’s just a movie fan, scanning for quick insight, it was wonderful: anecdotal and fun to read.

  Crowe was a reporter before he became a filmmaker, and you get both sides of him here. He’s interviewing Billy Wilder, who made Some Like It Hot and The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, and sometimes Crowe talks to him like a peer and sometimes like the best-informed fan in the world. In a typical bit of wisdom, Wilder is explaining to Crowe how director Ernst Lubitsch solved a story problem Wilder was having in writing the screenplay for Ninotchka: How would they show Greta Garbo’s evolution from hard-core Communist to fierce capitalist without a lot of cumbersome speechifying? They’d do it with a prop! A hat! At three spots in the film. Near the top, she’s with her three Bolshevik comrades and spots the hat in a store window and sneers at this capitalist trinket: “She gives it a disgusted look and says, ‘How can a civilization survive which allows women to wear this on their heads?’ Then the second time she goes by the hat and makes a noise—tch, tch, tch. The third time, she is finally alone, she has gotten rid of her Bolshevik accomplices, opens a drawer and pulls it out. And now she wears it.”

  I spent a lot of my spare time over the last three years cowriting and coproducing a film—not a documentary but a comedy, with actors and all—and I’m having the pleasure of rereading the book and noticing completely different things now that I’ve gone through the process. That Ninotchka story was a complete revelation when I first read it, a totally new idea, that you’d illustrate out the turns in a story through a prop like that. Now I realize, that’s the basics. The ABCs. Every move in a screenplay aspires to work like that, to illustrate the emotional beats and the plot turns with such simple visual gestures.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. God knows he doesn’t need the press: he’s the greatest living nonfiction writer; Brad Pitt stars in the movie adaptations of his books. But The Big Short made me want to give up journalism it’s so good. Scene after scene I felt like, how do you compete with this? He’s telling the story of the mortgage crisis, and his angle couldn’t be better: he follows the guys who knew it was coming and bet on it. This lets him explain how they knew and tell the story through these amazing contrarians and great funny scenes. It’s crazy how funny the book is. And as a story it’s got everything going against it. His characters are rich know-it-alls, but somehow Lewis makes you love them because he loves them. You know how it’s all going to end, but somehow he creates suspense. When the market doesn’t collapse as quickly as his characters think it should, some of them start to wonder: “Am I wrong? Is the whole world right and I’m wrong?” It all climaxes in this amazing, almost hallucinogenic set of scenes at this convention for the mortgage industry in Las Vegas, where our heroes have a series of encounters that make them all realize, no, no, no, they’re not wrong. Everything’s going to collapse. The economy will go to hell. And these people walking around are like zombies who just don’t know they’re doomed.

  What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

  It’s rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. 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.

  So many books began as segments on This American Life. Do you have a favorite?

  Naked, by David Sedaris. I love it when Sedaris writes about his mom and his family, and I love when he writes about his boyfriend, Hugh. These stories are just as funny as anything he ever writes, but have all that extra emotional resonance. The story about his mom dying, “Ashes,” is my favorite story of his, the barest thing in the book. I just wish the title essay weren’t in the book. Doesn’t really belong with all the biographical stuff.

  Is there a This American Life segment that you wish would be made into a book?

  Nah. If anything, I think too many of the ones that are made into books were better as twenty- to thirty-minute radio stories and should’ve stayed that way. Problem is, a thirty-minute radio piece, typed out, would total less than fifteen pages, and nobody publishes a book that short. But some of these stories are such important personal stories for the writers that once they finish the version of the story that goes on the radio, they feel sure that something else should be done with it. So they do books. Which feels more permanent to them, though as a radio person I feel differently about that.

  Take a moment to champion unheralded writers. Who do you think is egregiously overlooked or underrated?

  I don’t know about egregious, but there’s a book I loved called When the Shooting Stops … the Cutting Begins, by Ralph Rosenblum, that any fan of the early Woody Allen would like, and that nobody seems to know about. Rosenblum was Allen’s editor on all those early classics, and explains how different the final cuts were from what was shot. It’s well known, I guess, that Annie Hall was a radically different movie after the editing, and Rosenblum walks you through what they did. If I remember right, he also claims that he personally invented the falling-in-love montage, where you see the couple buy vegetables at the open-air market and get caught in the rain while a song plays. He says he invented it for the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns, and the song is one Jason Robards plays on a ukulele if I remember correctly. If he is the rightful inventor, where’s the statue to the guy?

  What were your most cherished books as a child?

  A few years ago I reconnected with a close friend from childhood after not seeing him for two decades. His name’s Maury Rubin, and he’d moved to New York from Baltimore, where we grew up. One of the first things he said to me was, “Can I ask you something?” I remember he leaned in close for this and his voice got low. “Did you read anything when we were growing up? Did anyone ever tell us to read?” He’d been dating women in New York and said it often came up, they’d ask him what his favorite books were as a kid. He always thought: “Books? Were we supposed to have favorite books?” I totally related. We weren’t dumb kids. We were expected
to get good grades and go to college. But reading was something you did for school. I was in college before the thought occurred to me that reading was something I could do for pleasure. Finally I met people (or maybe they were always around but I was too self-absorbed to notice) who enjoyed reading.

  So all the books I loved as a kid were comic books; Peanuts Treasury as a little kid. It defined the emotional climate of my elementary years. I completely identified with the loneliness and melancholy of Charlie Brown. And Doonesbury Chronicles was a revelation to me when I was in middle school. I’d never met people like the ones in Doonesbury, or a world like that where the people were so smart and talked about politics and the stuff they talked about.

  Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?

  Hermione. Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he’s chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione—she’s working harder than anyone, she’s half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn’t be there at all. It’s so unfair that Harry’s the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.

  You studied semiotics at Brown. How has that informed the way you read novels?

  I don’t read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

  But the fact is, I don’t read many books. I’m in production year-round. I work long hours, I have a dog and a wife. There’s not a lot of available time for consuming any culture: TV, movies, books. When I read, it’s generally magazines, newspapers, and Web sites.

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

  Could someone please write a book explaining why the Democratic Party and its allies are so much less effective at crafting a message and having a vision than their Republican counterparts? What a bunch of incompetents the Dems seem like. Most people don’t even understand the health care policy they passed, much less like it. Ditto the financial reform. Or the stimulus. Some of the basic tasks of politics—like choosing and crafting a message—they just seem uninterested in.