[ad_1]
What is the best book you have ever received as a gift?
“Tales from Shakespeare” by Charles and Mary Lamb. My dear middle school teacher gave this to me as a bar mitzvah gift, probably never suspecting how much Lamb would mean to me.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books impress you the most?
Since then, I’ve read many baseball books that I’ve forgotten. I’ve eaten “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I still love Stevenson even though they tried more than his editing.
How has your taste in reading changed over time?
As an adolescent reader, I was drawn to intense, painful, dramatic writers like Dostoevsky and Celine. Now I find myself more attracted to the calm, ironic ones. I’ve been reading British female novelists to an extreme lately: Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, all very satisfying.
If you could ask the president to read a book, what would it be?
Edited by “The Glorious American Essay”… me. And after that, “The Book of Unrest”, which will shake the certainties that Fernando Pessoa may have left.
You’re throwing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite?
Sei Shonagon, Michel de Montaigne and Max Beerbohm. Unfortunately all ghosts. I wonder what the confessional Michel and the witty Max will make of each other, and which of the fascinating observant, discerning writers of “The Pillow Book” would want to go home with.
Disappointed, overrated, just not good. Which book did you feel you should like and dislike? Do you remember the last book you left unfinished?
JD Salinger’s “Hunter in the Rye” didn’t speak to me. Holden Caulfield made me very uncomfortable when I first read it, and I never gave it a second chance. The last book I left unfinished was “The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow. Prose was too rich for my blood, I’m afraid.
[ad_2]
Source link