“My wife gave me the first edition of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ to be published in English (in 1886),” says the novelist Amor Towles, whose new book is “The Lincoln Highway.” “That the edition was in translation was just as well, since I don’t read a word of Russian.”
What books are on your night stand?
For the last 16 years, I’ve been reading with three friends. Every month, we meet in a restaurant in New York City to discuss a novel, arriving at 7 and lingering until they close the place. We typically pursue projects. One spring we read Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady,” Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” a project we referred to as “19th-Century Wives Under Pressure.” Often, we’ll read five or six works by a single writer chronologically. We’re about to launch into a survey of the Australian Nobel laureate, Patrick White. So, his “The Tree of Man” is at the top of my pile.
What’s the last great book you read?
Earlier this year, I was asked to write an introduction for the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises.” I enjoyed rereading the book immensely. Hemingway began writing it on his 26th birthday, almost a hundred years ago. At the time, he was still married to the first of his four wives. By trade, he was still a foreign correspondent living in Paris. It was before his trip to Africa to hunt big game. Before his face would adorn the cover of Life magazine — three separate times. Before the compromising effects of fame, wealth and recognition. So, in picking up “The Sun Also Rises” today, we have the opportunity to set aside what we think we know about Hemingway as a man and writer, to set aside what we think we know about his style, to read the book as if it were newly released, and to be amply rewarded for doing so.
Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?
Great writing can make almost anything interesting. Any subjects, any settings, any themes. But for me, bad writing is an insurmountable obstacle.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
When I was a college sophomore in the early 1980s, I had the good fortune of being admitted to a fiction writing seminar with a visiting modernist named Walter Abish. As part of the class, he gave us a list of about a hundred novels that he admired. The list included an array of inventive writers and stylists, most of whom I had never heard of, including Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Evan S. Connell, Julio Cortázar, Jean Genet, Elizabeth Hardwick, Knut Hamsun, Milan Kundera, Grace Paley and Alain Robbe-Grillet. With the list fraying in my pocket, I began tracking down these novels whenever I was in a used bookstore. For the next few years, as soon as school would let out, I would retreat alone to my family’s summer house, where I would sit on the porch and read one book a day. It was pure bliss. It also had a lasting influence on me as an artist.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Harry Mathews’s “Cigarettes.” The only American-born member of the experimental confederacy Oulipo, Mathews often wrote about shattering conventions, and thus his work can be somewhat uneven. But in “Cigarettes” he gives us a sly, inventive and entertaining novel which is a racy investigation of midcentury New York society.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
I admire a lot of my contemporaries as writers. But Ann Patchett is someone I admire not simply as a writer, but as an advocate for independent bookstores and new voices, as half of a grand marriage, as a graceful thinker, a sly humorist, a generous spirit. I could go on.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?
Before I set out on a new project, I like to read a handful of novels written in (and ideally set in) the time period in which I’m about to immerse myself. My new novel, “The Lincoln Highway,” takes place over 10 days in June of 1954, so in anticipation I read a number of American works from the mid-50s including James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953); Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” (1953); Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955); and Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1955). What I love in particular about this list of concurrent classics is how varied they are in terms of geography, tone and theme. In aggregate they provide a snapshot of America’s socioeconomic, regional and racial diversity. They also showcase very different approaches to effective storytelling.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
During the summer I like to read crime and suspense novels by individual authors in chronological order. In recent summers I’ve read the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald, the George Smiley novels by John le Carré and the Parker novels by Richard Stark — all terrific. This summer I’ve been reading the Bosch books by Michael Connelly, which are so exactly right.
Do you distinguish between “commercial” and “literary” fiction? Where’s that line, for you?
Not really. I’m more interested in distinguishing books that are well written, rich and multilayered from those that aren’t (preferring to read the former and skip the latter). If we look back at those books that have survived for more than half a century, they tend to be well written, rich and multilayered, but in their time some were classed as commercial and others as literary.
How do you organize your books?
I keep what I admire close at hand.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
The shelves in my study are almost exclusively weighed down by books, with a significant weighting to novels. But there are a few exceptions tucked in among the books including DVD sets of the complete original “Star Trek” and “The Rockford Files.” No explanation necessary.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
“A Gentleman in Moscow” was published within days of my 20th anniversary. To celebrate, my wife gave me the first edition of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” to be published in English (in 1886). That the edition was in translation was just as well, since I don’t read a word of Russian.
What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?
When my son was about 10, we went to London together, where our visit to the Churchill war rooms proved to be a highlight. Last year — when he was 18 — we had great fun reading “The Splendid and the Vile,” Erik Larson’s rip-roaring description of Churchill’s first year as prime minister, a year that coincided with the Blitz.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
My discovery of reading as a consuming pleasure began with the Hardy Boys. As a middle-class family in the early 1970s, we didn’t dine out or travel that much. But my father was always willing to buy us a book. The summer I discovered the Hardy Boys mysteries, I would spend the day reading one of them from beginning to end, then make my father take me to the bookstore so that he could buy me the next volume. A few years later, it was the works of Ray Bradbury. Then Tolkien. And so on.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
I have no desire to have my life story written. But if it were a necessity, I would ask it be written by someone who would leave my life virtually unrecognizable. Someone like Gabriel García Márquez or Franz Kafka.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville and Bob Dylan. It would either be the most interesting dinner of my life, or the one with the most awkward silences. Maybe both.
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