Yearly Archives: 2019

120 posts

Filling Holes in the Reading Résumé

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Filling holes. Classical holes, yet. Not just any “dog-just-dug-it-up-in-showers-of-dirt” holes.

Every year or two I take on a behemoth that I haven’t read but should have read because so many better readers than me have and have been the better for it. Accomplishments on this list include The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), Don Quixote (Cervantes), and Moby-Dick (Melville).

In each case, they’re the type of books that people expect to find on your résumé and are surprised when they don’t. You are, after all, “well-read” (or at least rumor has it).

This year, as of yesterday, the intimidator of the moment is James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am not traveling alone, however. Per advice of better-read friends, I am reading a companion book at the same time: Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book.

The routine is this: Bloomsday Book about chapter you are about to begin, followed by same chapter in Joyce’s book. Kind of like Virgil walking you through Dante’s wine cellars.

Not that I’m any Joyce neophyte. I have read both Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I even see this web site (I would say “blog,” but they are hopelessly out of date) as an ongoing Portrait of the Poet as a Getting-On (I refuse to say “Old”) Man. So there’s that. But neither of those quite measures up to the reindeer games found in Ulysses.

The trouble with reading a “filling-a-hole” book? It pretty much clears the deck on your reading schedule for huge swaths of calendar. That’s because you’re scratching your chin and going, “Hmn” so much. Or rereading a curious paragraph or three. Or making a notation for future reference (that will never be referred to).

But that’s OK. Keep your eyes on the prize, because, when you reach Chapter the Last, it’s always worth it. You feel like you do coming out of church or donating blood. You know: that certain nobility of spirit. As if to say, “Yep. Uh-huh. That was me over there, chatting up Joyce like we were old pals.” (It helped that Jimmy couldn’t see who he was talking to, but….)

So cheer me on, why don’t you. And if you’re not filling any holes in your own reading résumé, ask yourself why not. Then pick a doorstop — any doorstop — and get reading! You don’t need Penelope to tell you that you’ll be the richer for it.

“Fiction Isn’t Machinery, It’s Alchemy.”

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Before I say a reluctant goodbye to Peter Orner’s book, Am I Alone Here?, that has been such good company these past three days, I thought I’d share a few final quotes I marked in the book.

Six are from Orner himself, and three are ones he fished from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice (and boy, the writer’s voice is a lonely one, all right — especially if readers won’t buy and read his book).

“For a long time I thought reading would somehow make me a better writer. So I’d read in order to write. I’d justify the hours I spent with my feet up and call reading “my work.” Now I see how ludicrous this is. All the Chekhov in thirteen volumes won’t help me write a sentence that breathes. That comes from somewhere else, somewhere out in the world, where mothers die in car accidents accidents and daughters hide in pain. And yet I have come to the conclusion that reading keeps me alive, period. I wake to read and sleep so I can get up in the morning and read some more.”

“One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I’m drawn to certain stories because of their defiant refusal to do what I just tried to do, that is, explain themselves. Fiction isn’t machinery, it’s alchemy. Anybody who claims to shed complete light on the mechanisms by which fiction operates is peddling snake oil. A piece of fiction can have all the so-called essential elements, setting, character, plot, tension, conflict, and still be dead on the page that no amount of resuscitation would ever do any good.”

“Tolstoy, who (generally) adored Chekhov, once inferred that he might have been an even better writer if he had not been so dedicated a doctor. With all respect, Count, that’s bullshit. Chekhov’s being a doctor may well have been the key to how well he understood the connection between our ailing bodies and our ailing minds. To concern yourself with the hidden lives of others, including the long dead, especially at a time when you are trying to endure your own pain—is there a more generous act in life, in literature?”

“Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.”

“I once read that a reader is a person who lacks a critic’s complacency. I’ve always strived to be an uncomplacent reader, to retain a sense of wonder, even for stories I’ve read a dozen times. Sometimes I read a story and I think about it for hours, days, or, if I’m lucky, years. The thinking is the thing. The most I can give back to any story is a silence born of awe. But there are times, like these, when you want to say something, anything, if only to yourself and the wind in the trees.”

“It gets me every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

And three quotes Peter Orner shares from Frank O’Connor’s book, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story:

“For the short-story writer there is no such thing as essential form. Because his frame of reference can never be the totality of a human life, he must be forever selecting the point at which he can approach it, and each selection he makes contains the possibility of a new form as well as the possibility of a complete fiasco.”

“The saddest thing about the short story is the eagerness with which those who write it best try to escape it.”

“There is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.”

The Humbling Beauty in Reading-About-Reading Books

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Every writer is a reader, and every reader indulges himself now and then in a good “reading about reading” book.

This is where I’m at now as I amble through Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? (The answer is, Clearly not, P.O.!)

The thing about reading-about-reading books is how expensive they can be. No, I don’t mean the price on the book itself (this one is a $16.95 paperback), I mean the books the author tempts you with.

Think of it this way. You = addict. Author = dealer. Recommended books = the goods.

And so easy, the way this book is set up! Each chapter begins with a picture of the book Orner is lauding at great length. All oxymoronic, considering the long praise is for short story collections, for the most part. Orner, a practitioner himself, frowns on the novel-love of the publishing industry and says, six ways to Sunday night, “What about the short story, that little shining city on a hill?”

Thus he adds to my list such must-see collections as Chekhov’s Selected Stories (but of course, when talking stories, one starts at Mecca), The Stories of Breece DJ Pancake, All Stories Are True (John Edgar Wideman), The Lonely Voice (Frank O’Connor), The Bride of the Innisfallen (Eudora Welty), Selected Stories (Robert Walser), The Burning Plain and Other Stories (Juan Rulfo), All the Days and Nights (William Maxwell), Cheating at Canasta (William Trevor), Collected Stories (Wright Morris), Dusk and Other Stories (James Salter), and Spirits and Others Stories (Richard Bausch).

This is an incomplete list, but if you count the pennies in your cart on Barnes & Noble, you’ll see you’re about 1,267 poem sales away from breaking even.

What’s even more daunting is how well-read authors of reading-about-reading books make you feel as a supposedly seasoned reader. On the list above, for instance, I’ve only read the Chekhov and the Pancake and I’ve never even heard of (until I listened now) Juan Rulfo.

Where have I been, one wonders? What have I been doing with my wastrel reading life, one cries? And how is it that I haven’t fully appreciated these short story masters as much as Orner has?

All good questions, but that’s the point. That’s why you buy a reading-about-reading book in the first place. When you’re done, you select a few of the recommended books that seem most intriguing to you by weighing the excerpts provided by the author and the commentary he adds. Then you buy them to see exactly what’s been going on here, right under your negligent nose all of these years.

And you can’t stop there, either. When writing about Pancake, Orner says, “Stories fail if you read them only once. You’ve got to meet a story again and again, in different moods, in different eras of your life.” Can’t you just feel your reading to-do list growing, like that 10-year-old kid of yours who, just yesterday, was accepted to a college?

Meanwhile, there’s pitiful me, the suddenly chastened “well-read” guy who hasn’t read much anything as described in Am I Alone Here?

Guilty as charged. But even though I haven’t read all of these authors, now I’ve at least read about all of these authors. Doesn’t that count for something? At least until I buy two or three of the collections Orner waxes rhapsodic about?

Yes, it does. And it must in a world where we can’t be too hard on ourselves, even as readers and especially as writers who read and realize that reading more begets writing more and writing better.

Besides, you have to console yourself, has it ever occurred to you that you’ve read a couple hundred books the author of this reading-about-reading book hasn’t?

Ah. Breathe in, breathe out. Reading is not a competition, thank God.

“Pepper Trees Brushing the Roof Like Rain”

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Charles Bukowski is one of those enviable poets known even to people who think poetry is a joke. Although I had never read much of his work (until this week, thanks to The Pleasures of the Damned, which collects his poems from 1951-1993), I knew enough to consider him one of those characters who carefully cultivates a persona. You know, like Hemingway did: writer as womanizer, hard drinker, eloquent cusser.

As it turns out, yes and no. (And how often in life does it turn out “yes and no”?) Bukowski’s poems are, indeed, rife with booze and sex and select profanity, but like Hemingway, his toughness is similar to the turtle’s: hard on the outside, soup on the inside.

There’s frequent reference to symphonic music, for instance. Bukowski was an aficionado, a fan of both Wagner’s and Mahler’s, among others.

And there’s a tender side that keeps surfacing, a capital-R Romantic side. No poem shows it better than the memory piece, “for they had things to say,” a paean to his grandmother and her house with the canaries and the lemon tree.

Let’s listen in to Mr. Tough Guy, shall we?

for they had things to say
Charle Bukowski

the canaries were there, and the lemon tree
and the old woman with warts;
and I was there, a child
and I touched the piano keys
as they talked —
but not too loudly
for they had things to say,
the three of them;
and I watched them cover the canaries at night
with flour sacks:
“so they can sleep, my dear.”

I played the piano quietly
one note at a time,
the canaries under their sacks,
and there were pepper trees,
pepper trees brushing the roof like rain
and hanging outside the windows
like green rain,
and they talked, the three of them
sitting in a warm night’s semicircle,
and the keys were black and white
and responded to my fingers
like the locked-in magic
of a waiting, grown-up world;
and now they’re gone, the three of them
and I am old:
pirate feet have trod
the clean-thatched floors
of my soul,
and the canaries sing no more.

It was one of those poems where I stop and read it again. And again. Such nice sounds and sentiments. Such nice memories, so much so that it gets you thinking about your own past and how the past plays tricks, coming across like a storybook cherished in childhood.

Was the world really ever that gentle and lovely and perfect? Of course the answer is no, but the driving force in writing about childhood like this is yes.

Yes and no again! Rearing its lovely head.

Bukowski’s Cat

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We’ve all heard of Schrödinger’s cat. He’s sealed in a box, poor thing, with radioactive material and something called quantum superposition. That’s geek speak for an experiment centered on being “simultaneously alive and dead,” which is a tricky business, even for 9-lived felines who ain’t feeling so fine.

Less famous is Bukowski’s Cat, apparently quantum-free. This week I picked up over 500 pages of Charles Bukowski poetry in the form of the book, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993.

The lead-off batter? Bukowski’s cat! Very much alive, which is more than you can say for the mockingbird in its mouth — simultaneously alive and dead — and no box needed!

If you’ve ever had an outdoor cat (politically incorrect as they are nowadays), you know the drill. Still, let’s see how deeds Darwinesque become poetry for writers like Bukowski:

The Mockingbird
Charles Bukowski

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn’t understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman’s legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

It’s no coincidence that Bukowski chooses a mockingbird. Doing so gives the poem an almost Aesopian feel. There’s a moral to this fable, you see, only the bird won’t be around long enough to learn from it. Maybe the reader, then?

And, as I am 100 pages in, I note two stylistic quirks Bukowski loves: lowercase letters and single-lined stanzas at the finish. If you’re not famous and try this at home, expect your reader-friends to call you on it. Single lined finishes are gimmicky, they’ll say. A sure way to sink any poem.

But really, if there’s one thing I’ve learned as I ‘ve read, read, read (my poetic schooling in lieu of the pricey letters M, F, and A), it’s that rules by their nature are suspect. You know. Like John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald.

In Our Time: The Poetry of Resistance

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the tradition

In the past week, I’ve been reading a telling triptych of materials. As readers of this page know, I have Terrance Hayes’ book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. But I’m also slowly wending my way through Jericho Brown’s The Tradition.

To complete the trio, there’s the bad habit I have of reading front page news, where (alas!) the newspapers are addicted to tweets from He Who Must Not Be Named For Fear of Getting Cheetos Dust on the Furniture.

What a combo. And Hayes’ and Browns’ poems are better understood in this light. Or lack of light.

Consider it a variation of “through a glass darkly.” The days of being inspired to write a poem by trees or the moon are finished. For writers of color, at least, the drumbeat of degrading tweets and rally rants before ravenous crowds is enough. It’s like rich manure yielding bumper crops of literature.

I’m not sure I can call this situation a silver lining, but it makes for poetry that’s worth rereading, both for the empathy and for the talent. And I’m sure the Regrettable Muse doesn’t call only to people of color. The Accent-on-White House is inspiring a lot of political (and humanitarian and satirical and outraged) response from all quarters.

Hemingway’s first short story collection was called In Our Time, and some of the material (e.g. “Big Two-Hearted River”) was the result of his time — one of world wars created, as all wars are, by old politicians (presidents, premiers, dictators, fascists, Communists, and other stripes) for young men to die in.

As I read these poems, I can’t help but reflect on how much “our time” feeds our poetry and literature as well. Where there’s blood, there are roots that feed on it. And where there’s racism, there is soil that soaks it up and bears bitter fruit.

And so it goes, both sadly and beautifully, in our own time. One that we must not only own, but respond to and resist as writers always have—with the pen.

The Ever-Evolving Sonnet

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Sonnets. You remember them from school, right? In this corner we have the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, and in that corner we have the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet. Sonnets loved rules: Fourteen lines. Ten beats per line. A rhyme scheme.

But that was your great-great-etc. grandfather’s sonnet. The new sonnet has only one rule (and even that one is suspect), namely the 14 lines. Some say the lines should be about the same length to form a box-like construction, but some say pay no attention to that martinet behind the curtain.

As proof on how far the sonnet has come, I give you Terrance Hayes, who recently wrote a book of them called American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Catchy title, that. But not a book for rules. Instead, all 14-liners that care way more about voice than rules.

All are title-less, unless you count the first line as a title. Here is the lead-off batter of the entire collection:

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG? Dream on, Mr. Bard. You need not worry about rhyming. As you read the book, you’ll find that lovely Rita, Meter Maid, need not don her uniform, either.

What’s interesting is how the modern sonnet has made nice with free verse. Old school poets would have called them diametrical opposites, but old school poets have given up the tower and fled, porridge still steaming.

To see how close this sonnet comes to prose, you need only read it AS prose, then reconstruct it so Mr. Hayes doesn’t suspect Goldilocks at play. Here’s how it will look:

The black poet would love to say his century began with Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually it began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned, and skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary. What do you call a visionary who does not recognize her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing. His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent his beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it. He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

Prose and free verse are a bit like Romulus and Remus. Very good friends weaned off the wolf of rules.

Overall, good news for poets allergic to form poems. You, too, can write the new sonnet! Take 14 lines, drink plenty of liquids, and see me in the morning! Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying the rest of Hayes’s book.

“The Charm of Voice Is More Important Than Economy.”

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In his new, posthumous book, The Art of Voice, the gist of Tony Hoagland’s message can be found at the opening of Chapter 3, “The Sound of Intimacy: The Poem’s Connection with Its Audience.”

If you’ve been browbeaten by writing teachers and mentors who insist on economy at all costs, you might by surprised by his words:

“A successful poem is voiced into a living and compelling presence. The convincing representation of a speaker may be created by force, or intellectual subtlety, or companionability, or even by eccentricity, but it must initiate a bond of trust that incites further listening. That presence in voice is not always ‘intimate’ in a warm, ‘best friend’ kind of way, but the reader must be impressed that the speaker is a complex, interesting individual who is intriguingly committed to what she is saying, and how she is saying it.”

So far, so good. And it holds true for all writing, I think. Even blog posts. Do I have a voice here? With words as your only camera, can you “see” me by dint of diction alone? Hoagland continues:

“Such presence is only sometimes created by brevity. Many gurus on the craft of writing declare that a writer should ‘make every word count.’ Yet in poetry, often the charm of voice is more important than economy. After all, most of our daily interchanges don’t convey information in an economical manner. When we say ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Looks like rain,’ our speech isn’t really about conveying information, but about signaling to the listener that someone is present and accessible—open to conversation. They are gestures of presence. How about them Seahawks?”

I love that embedded little quote in this paragraph: “Often the charm of voice is more important than economy.” You can hear more than one poet craning her chin to the sky to shout, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”

“All day, every day, those ‘uhs’ and ‘ers’ and ‘likes’ pepper and salt our spoken interchanges. These ‘inefficiencies’ of speech serve a purpose in building tone and voice; they ‘warm’ and humanize poetic speech; and they have their own prosodic contribution to make to poems. These interruptives, asides, idioms, rhetorical questions, declaratives, etc., float through our sentences like packing material, which in a sense they are—they pack and cushion and modulate the so-called ‘contents’ of our communications. And this technically ‘inessential language’ creates an atmosphere of connectedness, of relationality.”

From there, Hoagland goes on to provide examples in poetry via poems that live and breath voice. Without the “inessential” verbiage, they’d sink. Start weeding out “unnecessary language” in these works (á la writing workshop feedback from the learn’d astronomers) and you’d have a poem that fails.

Fancy that. The unfanciness of it all, I mean.

But, as I said in part one (yesterday’s post on Hoagland’s book), this is not license to be sloppy and wordy in your writing. It is permission to consider the word “essential” hiding in “inessential,” especially if voice is the craft that you are working on as a writer.

Not working on that craft? Maybe you should be. And maybe Hoagland’s parting-this-world words will help you in that cause.

Tony Hoagland Gives His Blessing

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art of voice

Yesterday I picked up Tony Hoagland’s posthumous book and, I assume, the last, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. The purpose of this 168-pager is to promote ways writers can add “voice” to their poetry, and it doesn’t hurt that the essays enclosed have plenty of voice themselves.

“Voice” is one of those literary terms that everyone knows but no one wants to define. Hoagland is happy to oblige. He calls it “the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker.”

In his opening paragraph, he goes on: “In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo. Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery. When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it—that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.”

Sound pretty awesome. Sounds pretty “I’ll have some of what he’s having.” And as Hoagland further proves, voice forges a relationship between writers and readers. Voice eliminates the very idea that a reader might discontinue reading your poem after line three or thirteen. At the mercy of voice, a reader can’t help herself. She’s yours. She. Must. Read. On.

“A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tone, and temperature, by turns intimate, confiding, vulgar, distant, or cunning—but, above all, alive. In its vital connectivity, it is capable of including both the manifold world and the rich slipperiness of human nature,” Hoagland adds. Clearly, then, it is a topic worth 168 pages.

For me, in the early going of this book (which I’m still reading and, no doubt, will write plenty more about here), it is a blessing. The late Hoagland’s blessing to me personally. Which just goes to prove his point—the fact that I would take the early messages in this book personally, I mean. It is all a product of voice.

In Chapters 2 (“Showing the Mind in Motion”) and 3 (“The Sound of Intimacy”), Hoagland says it’s OK to ignore the common poetry-writing rule of cutting to the bone (details in future posts). Why? Because, too often, all that economy kills voice.

Hoagland even goes to bat for colloquialisms like “Here’s the thing,” “Hang on a sec,” “Laugh if you like,” “Know what I mean?” and “Well, you see….” Use words like that in a poetry writing class and the instructor will have the scissors out in the first minute. Or imagine a workshop approach where you read a poem with any of those expressions. Your workshop classmates (competitive lovelies that they are) will have the polite daggers before you get to the last line.

“Writing like this is superfluous,” they would say. “Wordy!” they would succinctly (by way of example) shout. “Prolix” the show-offs would smirk.

But what if it is all in the service of voice? Sure, it has to be done right, but many beginning poets feel as if it outright cannot be done. Poetry must be concise at all costs. Adjectives and adverbs are guilty until proven innocent.

And all of that is true. Until it’s not.

For that thought, I thank Hoagland and will continue to thank him as I read (and then reread) this little book. He has given me his blessing to be wordy if it serves a purpose and if it bonds the reader to my work.

If all this sounds like a tightrope walk, welcome to the business. Still, it’s good to learn once again that there are no easy answers or recipes to success when it comes to poetry. Answers are merely opinions, and that’s what makes for horse races (and books about writing poetry).

Reading the New York Times’ “By the Book” Feature

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One Sunday ritual I enjoy is reading The Book Review in the New York Times, where I can reliably find a feature called “By the Book.” In this column, famous people (mostly authors, but sometimes actors, singers, artists, etc.) answer pre-submitted questions about their reading habits, prejudices, and insights.

For me, “By the Book” is a great resource for books I want to explore and possibly read myself. Granted, some columns are richer than others, depending on the person interviewed. But I’ve also learned, over the weeks, that some of the Times‘ stock questions are better than others, too. Let’s take a look at some of them.

What Books Are on Your Nightstand? Always the opening volley, this question brings answers that are sometimes valuable, sometimes not. I often pick up ideas for books to read here, true, but many searches show the books to still be in the “advanced reader copy” phase. I also find that interviewed subjects use this question to promote books by friends, relatives, and people they owe favors to. When this occurs, it’s fairly easy to connect the dots with a little research.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most? Here, subjects most typically offer established contemporary authors along with their reasoning. That said, some will use it as an opportunity to promote a black sheep, dark horse, or unjustifiably unknown author worth checking out. The Times’ sometimes adds to this question by focusing on the specialty of the subject. For example, an artist might be asked to pick authors who write about art.
What’s your favorite thing to read? And what do you avoid reading? Here subjects often delve into genre or take pride in NOT delving into genre. Some admit to prejudices agains certain genres while other profess an open mind. As for the “avoid reading” question, at times “By the Book” will be more particular and ask about authors the subject avoids or dislikes, making it politically dangerous to specify a living author. Most subjects duck this question or choose a disliked writer who is conveniently dead.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? This question goes to writers only. I read every word because, as a writer myself, I find it interesting the way various authors separate (or don’t) “church and state.” Meaning: Some, if writing historical fiction, as an example, will refuse to read another writer’s historical fiction. Instead they’ll read a completely different genre, one lonely out in left field like poetry. Their reasoning is often fascinating and insightful. You can (and should) learn from all kinds of writing, so any writer who avoids a genre does so at his/her own risk.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? Another favorite, this question often begs trivia gleaned from nonfiction books. Often I say, “Huh,” and move on, sure to forget the interesting nugget I just temporarily learned. Ah, well. At least I had fun temporarily learning it!
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? Another chance for the subject to demonstrate his or her breadth as a reader. Another chance for me to follow up by researching the little-known title. Sometimes I even buy it.
What moves you most in a work of literature? A great question because there is such a wide variety in replies. Also, it’s a thoughtful question. Ask it of yourself. It’s not easy to pin down, especially if you go beyond stock answers like “plot” and “character.”
How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? I often skip this because I often don’t care. Do you scratch your chin with your right hand or your left? Do you stand in the shower facing the spray of water or facing away? Ho-hum.
How do you organize your books? Another section I skip. This might interest detail-oriented or obsessed sorts, but spatial guys like me don’t care about Dewey or his bloody Decimals, much less the alphabet, colors, or sizes of book spines someone uses to pretty-up their bookshelf. As the prophet Charlie Brown once professed: “Good grief!”
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I’m back in for this question, although the irony in the answer is usually lost on me because I don’t know the subject enough to fully appreciate the surprise. Instead, it becomes another oddball author or oddly random book title for the pondering.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? Here’s a chance to name drop. The subject will often choose a book, of course, but also offer the name of the gift-giver and the reason the book was so special. Interesting. And difficult to answer. Think how YOU would answer it, especially if you have been gifted so many books over the years.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I read this answer to see if it jibes with any of my favorites: Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Levin (or whatever his full name is, in Anna Karenina), and Jake Barnes. As for villains, I don’t have any favorites, but relish the chance to read about some that I might read up on.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? These two questions are separated. You could argue that answers are of interest only if you care about the subject being interviewed. It provides history to the development of that subject, after all. and thus would prove meaningful to you. But often it’s predictable fare that I skim over or skip entirely.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? Good God. A fruitless question, given the current presence in the White House. Many subjects use it as a predictable chance to say, “Why bother? The president can’t read.” Others will gamely offer a book and a reason, usually with political knives sharpened. In case you haven’t noticed, most writers are a liberal lot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? I call this the “Barbara Walters” question, kind of like “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” Too cute for its own good, in other words. I’ve yet to read an answer that’s particularly compelling. Like uploaded internet photographs of cats or food people are about to eat, it falls under the category of hashtag who cares (#whocares?).