By the Book (26 page)

What makes a good humor book?

The most critical element in any work of humor—this is something Plato talked about—is that at least one of the major characters should be an orangutan.

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?

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid—Batman, Archie, Richie Rich, pretty much anything unlikely to inspire intellectual development. I bought comics for a dime each at the Armonk Stationery Store and read them walking home. I also bought a lot of mail-order products advertised in the back of the comics, such as the X-ray vision glasses. It turned out that these glasses did not actually give you X-ray vision. But the Joy Buzzer, used properly, was an effective prank device.

Later on I became a big fan of
Mad
magazine. I also read (it goes without saying) a lot of Proust. But the books I read most as a child were the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. I wish that children would read Tom Swift books today, so they would learn that electricity is a powerful force to be used against evil—as in
Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone
—and not just to download Justin Bieber songs.

You have a twelve-year-old daughter. Do you recommend books to her or vice versa? Any recent crossover successes?

I think the last book I recommended that she liked was
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. She reads a lot, but she prefers
The Hunger Games
and other works belonging to a genre I would describe as “books that do not generate royalties for her father.”

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

The first time I read a Robert Benchley collection (I don't remember which one it was; my father had a bunch) I thought, “This is what I want to do.”

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What was the last book you hated? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I'm not a big fan of the Twilight series. I can't get past the premise, which is that a group of wealthy, sophisticated, educated, highly intelligent, centuries-old vampires, who can do pretty much whatever they want, have chosen to be … high school students. I simply cannot picture such beings sitting in a classroom listening to a geometry teacher drone on about the cosine. I have more respect for vampires than that.

Which of the books you've written is your favorite?

This may seem self-serving and promotional, but it's true: I really like the way
Insane City
came out. It has heart, and—more important—an orangutan.

Are you a rereader? What books in particular do you find yourself returning to, and why?

Maybe someday I'll go back and tackle
The Brothers Karamazov
again, if the president drops the ball.

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

Dave Barry: The Greatest Human Ever
.

Dave Barry
is the author, most recently, of
Insane City
,
I'll Mature When I'm Dead
, and
Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)
.

 

I'd Love to Meet (Continued)

We would probably all want to meet Shakespeare—or so we think. (We could ask the man if he'd really written all those plays, or if, somehow, he'd acquired them from—who?—Sir Philip Sidney's sister, perhaps? Wonder what W. S. would say to that.) Some of us have fantasized meeting Emily Dickinson. (The problem is, would either W. S. or E. D. want to meet us? Why?)

—
Joyce Carol Oates

I wasn't sure how to answer this one so I discussed it with my twelve-year-old daughter. She suggested Plato. I was impressed. So Plato it is. I think I'd want to ask him how he'd imagine life had changed by 2012.

—
Emma Thompson

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. What would I want to know? His gossip, his lovers, his religion (if any), the Silver Street days, his thoughts on England and power in the seventeenth century—as young then as the twenty-first is for us. And why he's retiring to Stratford. The biographies keep coming, and there's a great deal we know about Shakespeare's interactions with institutions of various kinds. England was already a protomodern state that kept diligent records. But the private man eludes us and always will until some rotting trunk in an ancient attic yields a Pepys-like journal. But that's historically impossible. He's gone.

—
Ian McEwan

I would have liked to meet John Ruskin, who has been a big influence on me, and whose eccentric visions of the ideal society (at the level of architecture and morality) I am constantly inspired by. He felt sad, persecuted, lonely and misunderstood. I would have wanted to try to be his friend.

—
Alain de Botton

Homer. The Bard, being blind and the speaker of an ancient language, would pose a delicious challenge. This is the kind of challenge that any good novel would present. I'd love, after traversing the gulf of communication, to find out what he believed he was doing. I say this because writers, after a while, become fictions themselves. They are, at once, influential and lost to us.

—
Walter Mosley

Shakespeare, whoever he really was. My dad was among the conspiracy theorists who think that the guy from Stratford-on-Avon wasn't really the Bard. I've got a lot I'd like to ask this fellow.

—
Jeannette Walls

Joseph Campbell. His writings on semiotics, comparative religion, and mythology (in particular
The Power of Myth
and
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
) helped inspire the framework on which I built my character Robert Langdon. The PBS interview series with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers was hands down the most thought-provoking conversation I've ever witnessed.

—
Dan Brown

I already met my hero: Kurt Vonnegut. I wanted to know if he liked Louis Armstrong better than Richard Wagner. I can't remember the answer. He poured me a drink, and we sat up listening to music. I left his house walking on air, soused, having drunk his liquor and smoked his filterless cigarettes. I asked him why he smoked filterless cigarettes, which are stronger and worse for you. He said, “More value.”

—
James McBride

Katherine Boo

What book is on your night stand now?

I'm currently reading
Ways of Going Home
, by the Chilean novelist and poet Alejandro Zambra. If it's only half as good as his novella,
Bonsai
, it'll still be a fine way to lose a weekend.

What was the last truly great book you read?

George Saunders's
Tenth of December
, as much as I hate to say so given that recent obnoxious headline in
The New York Times Magazine
[“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year”]. Saunders's earlier books had left me faintly less amazed than I felt I'd ought to be, but
Tenth
, in addition to being funny and stylistically cunning, contains some of the best writing about the psychological toll of inequality that I've read in years. Plus, like Alice Munro, Saunders knows when to end his stories—the moment when the best choice a writer can make is to slip away and leave the reader to assemble the last parts on her own.

What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure. Among recent happy diversions were Ben Fountain's
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
, Junot Díaz's
This Is How You Lose Her
, Cheryl Strayed's
Wild
, and the poet Jeet Thayil's first novel,
Narcopolis
, about the drug-hazed Bombay of the 1980s. Fountain, Díaz, Strayed, and Thayil have nothing in common except the most important thing, a total lack of pretension. They don't beat you down with their self-seriousness, and it's only when you're done that you realize how much wiser you are for their books.

Were there any novels that helped prepare you to enter the world of the slums?

What helped me prepare for the slum reporting was the immersion work I'd done in the United States. Though every community is different, my personal rule is pretty much the same: It's OK to feel like an idiot going in as long as you don't sound like an idiot coming out.

Where novels come in, for me, is when the reporting stops and the writing begins, because fiction writers seem to know more than nonfiction writers about distillation—conveying their analytical or psychological insights with economy. Being intent on conveying the diversity of experiences in a single slum (and equally intent on not writing a thousand-page tome), I paid particular attention to novels where points of view shifted quickly, among them
The Yacoubian Building
, by Alaa Al Aswany. I'm also obsessed with the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, who stays out of the picture and allows the so-called subjects of his work to emerge gradually.

Are there any Indian writers with recent or forthcoming books you're especially excited about?

Aman Sethi's
A Free Man
, about an itinerant laborer in a Delhi slum, is one of my recent favorites—an original sensibility joined to a passion for reported fact. I'm also eagerly awaiting Naresh Fernandes's
The Re-Islanding of Mumbai
, which should be out by the end of the year. When deep in my work at Annawadi I found it difficult to meet people from more affluent parts of Mumbai because the disconnects were too great. But talking to Naresh was different. He's a genuine humanist in an age of very few, and understands the conflicts inherent in a city like Mumbai better than anyone I know.

Do you ever hear from Corean and Kim, the two women you wrote about in your National Magazine Award–winning
New Yorker
piece, “The Marriage Cure”?

Kim's not been in touch recently, but Corean is doing well, and still fighting like mad on behalf of her children and grandchildren. She's one of several women I've come to know in the course of my work whose example and insight have helped me conduct my own life less ridiculously. In fact I hold her personally responsible for my marriage.

What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

My sister and I loved Encyclopedia Brown, the fifth-grade nerd/observer who seldom took more than a day to unravel the nefarious conspiracies of childhood. Every child detective requires a sidekick, obviously, and I thought Encyclopedia's sidekick, Sally Kimball, was way cooler than any of Nancy Drew's. In addition to being smart, Sally was the only kid in town who could beat up Bugs Meany. About the particular criminals Encyclopedia and Sally outwitted, the only one I remember is a cheater in a disgusting-sneakers competition. But as a child I treasured the idea of this infinitely just place called Idaville. In Idaville the weak were rarely bullied for long, and the bad guys didn't get away.

What was the last book that made you cry?

I'm not usually one for leaving tear stains in the margins, but in recent weeks I caught myself sobbing twice—while reading a Saunders story and a forthcoming book by my friend David Finkel. Finkel's first book,
The Good Soldiers
, followed a battalion charged with carrying out George W. Bush's “surge.” The new book follows some of those veterans as they struggle to reintegrate themselves into American life, and it's devastating.

The last book that made you laugh?

Spilt Milk
, by the Brazilian novelist Chico Buarque. A deathbed monologue about class, race, love, and political history has no right to be this funny.

What's the best love story you've ever read?

Shakespeare's underrated
Troilus and Cressida
, a story of flawed people in a transactional historical context that renders notions of pure love absurd. It's a love story for our time that just happened to be written at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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

I'm useless when I meet writers I love—I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. So I'm happy, even in my fantasy life, to give the Great Ones their space. It's enough to know them from what they put on the page.