By the Book (11 page)

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.

I remember reading in the
Times
that as soon as Obama won, the Republicans were scheming about how they'd turn it around for the next election, and came up with the plan that won them the House, and wondered, did the House Dems even hold a similar meeting? Kurt Eichenwald! Mark Bowden! John Heilemann and Mark Halperin! I'll preorder today.

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

Edgar Allan Poe. I don't have a question, but dude just seems like he could use a hug.

What do you plan to read next?

I just started the manuscript of this book,
And Every Day Was Overcast
, by Paul Kwiatkowski, that's unlike any book I've ever read. He's a photographer, and the book is a mix of this clean, spare, unaffected prose about growing up near the swamps of South Florida—plus these incredible photos he's taken of that area. Seems like he spent his teenage years wandering from one trashy spot to another, drinking vodka, taking drugs, and messing around with girls. It's totally killing me. A completely original and clearheaded voice. Google him if you're curious. Last I heard he doesn't have a publisher because it's such an in-between sort of project—part pictures, part story.

Ira Glass
is the producer and host of the public radio program
This American Life.

 

On My Nightstand

Postwar
, by the historian Tony Judt; David Finkel's account of US forces in Iraq, “The Good Soldiers”; and a proof of Nadeem Aslam's new book,
The Blind Man's Garden
, which I haven't started yet. Plus my notebook, in case a decent idea ambushes me after turning out the light.

—
David Mitchell

I'm halfway through
All the King's Men
, by Robert Penn Warren. I haven't read it since college.

—
John Grisham

Kearny's March
, by Winston Groom. The author of
Forrest Gump
has become a wonderful military historian and tells us how, as a result of the Mexican War, we acquired not just Texas but New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and—every silver lining has its cloud—California.

—
P. J. O'Rourke

Three books: One is
Gypsy Boy
, by Mikey Walsh; a novel,
The Darlings
, by Cristina Alger; and a wonderful collection of stories by Alethea Black,
I Knew You'd Be Lovely
, which reminds me so much of the late, great Laurie Colwin.

—
Anne Lamott

Right now I'm reading a book called
Incognito
, by David Eagleman, about the human brain. I've always been interested in psychology, so learning about the things that influence our thinking is really important for me. In bodybuilding, I was known for “psyching” out my opponents with mind tricks. I wish I had this book then because the stuff I was doing was Mickey Mouse compared with what's in this book.

—
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Pedantically, none, because I don't have a night stand. So my version of the question would be: What book is on your kitchen counter now, waiting to be picked up in the morning while the first pot of coffee brews? And today's answer is:
Live by Night
, by Dennis Lehane. I always read for an hour or two in the morning, before I do anything else. And Lehane was in my graduating class, so to speak, in that we came up together, and in some ways he's the best of us.

—
Lee Child

Sabine Kuegler,
Child of the Jungle
. This unique book is the autobiography of the daughter of a German missionary linguist couple, who moved when she was a child to live with a Fayu clan in a remote area of swamp forest in Indonesian New Guinea.