What books are on your favorite author’s nightstand? Pamela Paul finds this out for you every week with her “By The Book” feature in the New York Times Book Review. She invites authors like Christopher Buckley, Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini, Donna Tartt, Dave Eggers, Lena Dunham, Carl Hiaasen, and many others to reflect on their reading and writing habits, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations. She collected 65 of the best interviews for By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review (Henry Holt and Co., $28). She’ll speak at Politics and Prose on Saturday, November 1st at 6 p.m.
The “By The Book” column began with Paul’s desire to know what the world’s top authors like to read themselves. “We all want to know what other people are reading,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “We stare at strangers’ book covers on an airplane and lean over their e-books on the subway.” This satisfies our curiosity, starts substantive conversations, and helps us pick out what we want to read next.
Eventually, she decided to expand to some non-“book people,” like musicians, actors, scientists, and the president of Harvard. The variety of responses elicited the “excitement of unexpected discovery,” she writes.
Many of her questions are kept consistent for each interviewee: “What was the last truly great book you read?” “What book had the biggest impact on you?” “Any guilty pleasures?” “If you could require the President to read one book, what would it be?” Answers range from Great Expectations to Fifty Shades of Grey, Moby Dick, Harry Potter, and everything in between.
It’s interesting to see the differences, commonalities, quirks, and senses of humor come through from certain authors. Plus, their relatability — you’re in good company reading The Onion and celebrity gossip, and struggling to finish Ulysses.
By The Book includes the full, uncut versions of the interviews from the column. Perhaps predictably, they end up being about much more than books; they provide a peephole into authors’ personal experiences and writing processes. Readers who write themselves, or just admire the authors interviewed, will be especially intrigued.
Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review, and has written for The Economist, The Atlantic, Time, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Vogue, and many other publications. She has authored three previous books, including The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, Pornified, and Parenting, Inc. She and her family live in New York City.
The talk is free to the public and will be followed by a Q&A and signing.
