By the Book (12 page)

—
Jared Diamond

Rome
, by Robert Hughes. Though I'm finding it challenging to read about Rome without immediately wanting to run away to Rome.

—
Elizabeth Gilbert

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.

—
Katherine Boo

I'm loving Adam Johnson's
The Orphan Master's Son
, set in North Korea. The novel won this year's Pulitzer but, more important, comes with the enthralled recommendations of writer friends. Like most readers, I'm inclined to rely on the word of people in my life whose tastes I respect.

—
Scott Turow

Junot Díaz

You've just recovered from back surgery. What books helped you get through it?

Man, you guys have some good intel. I have family members who only found out after the neck brace came off. But definitely, I read like crazy while I was laid up; reading for me is proof against anything, but especially pain. These books in particular gave solace: Two superb collections of stories, from Krys Lee (
Drifting House
) and Tania James (
Aerogrammes
). Also Wasik and Murphy's
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus
. But really, the book that most lifted me out of my bent clay was Ramón Saldívar's
The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
. There's a reason Saldívar won the National Humanities Medal. His insights on Paredes's years reporting in Japan alone are priceless.

What's the last truly great book you read?

Katherine Boo's
Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
A book of extraordinary intelligence, humanity, and (formalistic) cunning. Boo's four years reporting on a single Mumbai slum, following a small group of garbage recyclers, have produced something beyond groundbreaking. She humanizes with all the force of literature the impossible lives of the people at the bottom of our pharaonic global order, and details with a journalist's unsparing exactitude the absolute suffering that undergirds India's economic boom. The language is extraordinary, the portraits indelible, and then there are those lines at the end that just about freeze your heart: “The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.”

In fiction, though, the “last truly great book” I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's
Bonsai
. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust. You get the cold flesh of the story in that chilling first line: “In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death.” But only by reading to the end do you touch the story's haunted soul. A total knockout.

Among the many books on your shelves are
What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction
, by Paul Kincaid;
Shikasta
, by Doris Lessing;
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún
, by J. R. R. Tolkien; and
By Night in Chile
, by Roberto Bolaño. Can you tell us about any of those books—what you thought of them, what they meant to you?

Tolkien I grew up on, fed my insatiable Ungoliant-like hunger for other worlds; I was a young fan and yet, even as an adult, I continue to wrestle with Tolkien for reasons that have much to do with growing up in the shadow of my own Dark Lord—that's what some dictators really become in the imagination of the nations they afflict.
Shikasta
was a book I used to see at the library a lot when I was growing up but which finally came into my hands when I was in college. A strange anti-novel that purports to be the history of our world from the perspective of our sympathetic alien caretakers.
Shikasta
takes that sub-zeitgeist “theory” that God and his angels are actually alien visitors to its logical conclusion. Not the easier read, but the book had a lasting impact on me. I've always wanted to write something with
Shikasta
's scope, with its thematic and structural bravura. Alien ethnographic reports on our Old Testament history mixed with cranky letters home by overworked alien bureaucrats and a moving realistic journal written by a young Lessing-like teenager living in Africa in the years before a worldwide youth revolt—bananas stuff. As for Bolaño, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus. Is there really anything in print even remotely approaching
By Night in Chile
? For anyone like me obsessed with the interplay between the personal and the historical,
By Night in Chile
is a master class in which Bolaño manages to distill the perverse brutal phantasmagorical history of an entire continent down to 150 seductive pages. A halfhearted priest secretly teaching Marxism to Pinochet so the demon general might better know his enemy? Latin American letters (wherever it may reside) has never had a greater, more disturbing avenging angel than Bolaño.

What was the last book that made you cry?

That's easy: the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Eduardo Corral's collection,
Slow Lightning
. When I finished that book I bawled. Wise and immense, but peep for yourself: “Once a man offered me his heart and I said no. Not because I didn't love him. Not because he was a beast or white—I couldn't love him. Do you understand? In bed while we slept, our bodies inches apart, the dark between our flesh a wick. It was burning down. And he couldn't feel it.”

The last book that made you laugh?

K. J. Bishop's
The Etched City
. I'm a sucker for lines like “He had numerous stories of recent adventure and suffering—specifically, his adventures and other people's suffering, almost invariably connected—that he told with the air of an amiable ghoul.”

The last book that made you furious?

The Femicide Machine
, by Sergio González Rodríguez. The notorious femicides in Juárez were not unknown to me, but González Rodríguez's grisly postmortem of the cultural, political, and economic forces behind these atrocities would infuriate anyone.

What were your most cherished books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from children's literature?

I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. Donald Sobol passed recently, and that really brought it all back to me, how important his books were to my little self. I didn't learn to read until I was seven, so I missed out on the early stuff, jumped right to chapter books, right to Encyclopedia Brown. What I loved about Boy Detective Leroy Brown was that (1) he was unabashedly smart (smart was not cool when and where I grew up) and (2) his best friend was a girl, tough Sally Kimball, who was both Leroy's bodyguard and his intellectual equal. Sobol did more to flip gender scripts in my head than almost anybody in my early years.

If someone really wanted to understand the Dominican Republic, and the Dominican-American experience, what books would you suggest?

That's a tough one. We need a lot more books in English about the Dominican experience. Fortunately the field is growing, and there's some good stuff out there. I recommend one start with one of the country's greatest poets, Pedro Mir, his
Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems
. Pure genius. Then read Ginetta Candelario's
Black Behind the Ears
for a superbly guided journey through the complexities of Dominican racial identity. Also Frank Moya Pons's
The Dominican Republic: A National History
is excellent, and so is Julia Alvarez's novel
In the Time of the Butterflies
.

Other great novels about the immigrant experience in America you'd recommend?

Gish Jen's
Typical American
is another one of my personal classics. A masterpiece of a novel bursting with wit, yearning, and truth, and for an immigrant kid like me looking for an idiom with which to write about an experience that we in this country don't talk about enough—absolutely indispensable. Maxine Hong Kingston's
The Woman Warrior
is not exactly a novel, but few books out there can rival its powerful vision of what it means to live simultaneously in two worlds.

You teach creative writing at MIT. What books do you find especially useful as a teacher?

All depends on the class. If I'm teaching straight creative writing I try to flood the students with great fiction, from Jamaica Kincaid to Pam Houston, and essays on craft by folks like Samuel R. Delany (his “About Writing” is spectacularly useful). I'm always trying to sneak Octavia Butler into all my syllabi. She is a master for all seasons.

Read any good graphic novels recently?

Yes, Jason Shiga's
Empire State: A Love Story (or Not)
. Oakland boy loses best female friend to New York City and takes a cross-country bus trip to try to transform friendship into love. A bicoastal heartbreaker, beautifully rendered and deeply moving.

You're organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive. Who's coming?

José Martí, because he lived so many lives and because he was such a fantastic writer and because, damn it, he was José Martí (he also lived in the New York City area, so that will help the conversation). Octavia Butler because she's my personal hero, helped give the African diaspora a future (albeit a future nearly as dark as our past) and because I'd love to see her again. And Arundhati Roy because I'm still crushing on her mind and on
The God of Small Things
.

Who are the best short story writers?

People who like to suffer or perhaps people tempted by perfectibility. For that is the short story's great lure—that you can write a perfect one. With novels it's quite the opposite—the lure of the novel is that you can never write a perfect one. But do you mean who are the best short story writers by name? Wow. I'm certainly the worst judge of this as I've not read even one one-thousandth of what's out there in English. But if I had to cobble together a short list from what I've read, I'd have to say Roberto Bolaño is my number one; read
Last Evenings on Earth
and tremble. Mary Gaitskill as well; she makes the rest of us look like we don't know jack about the human soul. And then Sandra Cisneros and Anne Enright and Ted Chiang, who have each written as perfect a collection of stories as I've ever read. Also Michael Martone, Lorrie Moore, Edwidge Danticat, Tobias Wolff, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, Annie Proulx, Yiyun Li, Sherman Alexie. Honestly the list is long; the form is blessed with awesome practitioners.

You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?

This is a question that always kills me. For a book lover this type of triage is never a record of what was brought along but a record of what was left behind. But if forced to choose by, say, a shipwreck or an evil
Times
editor, I'd probably grab novels that I'm still wrestling with. Like Samuel R. Delany's
Dhalgren
(which in my opinion is one of the greatest and most perplexing novels of the twentieth century) or Toni Morrison's
Beloved
(to be an American writer or to be interested in American literature and not to have read
Beloved
, in my insufferable calculus, is like calling yourself a sailor and never having bothered to touch the sea) or Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian
(so horrifyingly profound and compellingly ingenious it's almost sorcery). Maybe Octavia Butler's
Dawn
(set in a future where the remnants of the human race are forced to “trade” genes—read: breed involuntarily—with our new alien overlords). Or Gilbert Hernandez's
Beyond Palomar
(if it wasn't for
Poison River
I don't think I would have become a writer). Perhaps Leslie Marmon Silko's
Ceremony
or Alan Moore's
Miracle-man
or Margaret Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale
—books that changed everything for me. To be honest I'd probably hold a bunch of these books in hand and only decide at the last instant, as the water was flooding up around my knees, which three I'd bring. And then I'd spend the rest of that time on the desert island dreaming about the books that I left behind and also of all the books, new and old, that I wasn't getting a chance to read.

What do you plan to read next?