I could look at Andy Goldsworthy books forever. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? People might be surprised not only to find “My Love Affair With Miami Beach” on my shelves, but to learn that Isaac Bashevis Singer penned this book at all. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? And I would be remiss not to mention the charm and family orientation of Allegra Goodman’s “The Other Side of the Island.” in the election of 1940 - has clearly entered my subconscious, as has the unsettling ingenuity of Colson Whitehead. What predecessors did you look to for guidance or inspiration, if any?Ĭlassic dystopian novels like “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” have of course left their mark but so have more gently devastating books like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.” The alternative American reality in “The Plot Against America” - in which Philip Roth imagined what life might have been like had anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh beaten F.D.R. “The Resisters” is your first dystopian novel. Hence touchstones as disparate as all of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” James Salter’s “The Hunters,” Peter Taylor’s “The Old Forest,” Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” and Satchel Paige’s “Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.”ĭo you prefer books that reach you emotionally, or intellectually? But my oldest soft spot has been for people guarding some small flame against considerable winds. I am moved by many things - portrayals of the passage of time and of grief especially, these days. What moves you most in a work of literature? (Full disclosure: Such is my admiration, I wrote a kind of homage to Nisbett, “The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap.”) As for how Chinese culture is perpetuated, Lenora Chu’s candid account of her American child’s experience in an elite Chinese primary school, “Little Soldiers,” explains a lot even as it throws our own educational practices into relief. If you seek a deeper understanding, I strongly recommend Richard Nisbett’s great classic, “The Geography of Thought,” which puts to rest many ideas about universality once and for all. Qiu Xiaolong’s delightful Inspector Chen mysteries is a great place to start his most recent book, “Shanghai Redemption,” will give you a sense of the tricky and ever-shifting terrain the Chinese negotiate as a matter of course. What books about China would you recommend to a Western audience? I was, for example, fascinated by “Celestial Bodies,” by Jokha Alharthi, about three sisters in Oman, one of whom names her daughter London. Today, I see books as a source of ever more various pleasures but also, still, as a form of exploration. How could a country be an experiment? I wanted to know what that meant, and what an invented country might hold for people like my family. Then in high school I became interested - as a daughter of immigrants of course would - in every book that could tell me what America was. In junior high school, I began reading the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction, and writers like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. How have your reading tastes changed over time? My copies of “Heidi” and “Little Women” are still among my most precious possessions. Once I reached grade school my godmother would, however, send me one book a year, for Christmas. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and characters stick with you most?īecause I was not read to as a child, and because my immigrant family did not have the money for books in any case, I sadly missed Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit and many other talking animals. Travelogues like Henri Cole’s “Orphic Paris” and Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller’s “The Ancient Shore: Dispaches From Naples” are pure escapism. And from Julia Phillips’s “Disappearing Earth” I learned where Kamchatka was - which, embarrassingly, I did not know and would probably still not know, were it not for her book.ĭo you count any books as guilty pleasures? From Chia-Chia Lin’s haunting first novel, “The Unpassing,” I learned how treacherous the Alaskan mud flats can be. Have you learned anything from books you’ve read recently?įrom “Conversations With Beethoven,” I learned that Beethoven’s lawyer was named Bach. The Maestro’s responses thunder all the more loudly - and more poignantly - for their consignment to white space.
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Sanford Friedman’s “Conversations With Beethoven.” Because he went deaf late in life, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing - a fact Friedman exploits to great effect, telling the story of the last year of Beethoven’s life through people’s notes to him. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?