By the Book by Pamela Paul Page B

foisting Happy All the Time many times. I saved her note for twenty years. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was twenty-six, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
    â€” Anne Lamott
    I get hundreds of very sweet, heartfelt letters from parents thanking me for getting their kids reading. Each one absolutely makes my day—make that my week. Many, many women thank me for getting their husbands reading, or reading again. Occasionally, a husband thanks me for getting his wife reading, but that’s rare.
    â€” James Patterson
    As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones. Not a lot of people have read him, and even fewer like what he wrote, but those of us who like him like him all the way. We never met.
    â€” Neil Gaiman
    An Italian reader wrote to describe how he met his wife. She was on a bus, reading one of my books, one that he himself had just finished. They started talking, they started meeting. They now have three children. I wonder how many people owe their existence to their parents’ love of books.
    â€” Ian McEwan
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Richard Ford

    What book is on your night stand now?
    A Good Man in Africa , by William Boyd.
    When and where do you like to read?
    Not in bed. Long airplane rides are good. Early mornings before things get going.
    What was the last truly great book you read?
    A Writer at War , by Vasily Grossman. Grossman’s diaries and journalism from the Eastern Front. Riveting and immensely humane.
    Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
    I’m an equal opportunity reader—although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.
    What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?
    Probably Absalom, Absalom! , Faulkner’s masterpiece. I read it when I was nineteen. It embossed into my life the experience of literature’s great saving virtue. Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.
    If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
    A book of mine. What else? What am I, an altruist? He can choose which one.
    What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes?
    I read “book” books—the ones between covers. And I mark ’em all up. They’re mine, after all. Though I’m not opposed to e-books. It’s not a moral issue for me.
    Do you keep the books you read? Collect, store, shelve—or throw away, lend out, donate?
    I mostly keep my books. I go back often to ones I’ve read, and so want them around. I’ve spent thousands of dollars just moving books here and there. Although … many books that come to me unasked-for I give to the library. I never sell books.
    Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?
    I’m not a tough cry under any circumstances. And like the saying goes, “stand-up’s hard.” I like to be taught things. Plus, I’ve got enough distracting me without my reading only doing that.
    What was the last book that made you cry?
    My own book Canada made me cry the last time I read it. If it was any good, it should’ve. Beyond that, the very last book that made me cry was more than one poem in James Wright’s collected poems, Above the River .
    What were your favorite books as a child? Is there one book you wish all children would read?
    Rick Brant science mysteries. That said, being dyslexic, I wasn’t a great reader when I was a kid. And since I don’t have children, I don’t know what they should read. Probably