What books are on your night stand?
“Vile Days,” by Gary Indiana, “The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964,” by Joanne Kyger, “Maybe the People Would Be the Times,” by Lucy Sante, “Bee Reaved” and “When the Sick Rule the World,” by Dodie Bellamy, “The Stone Face,” by William Gardner Smith, “Since When,” by Bill Berkson, “Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara,” by Joe LeSueur, and “Was This Man a Genius? Talks With Andy Kaufman,” by the charmful Julie Hecht.
What’s the last great book you read?
I loved the pair of Gwendoline Riley novels NYRB put out last year, “My Phantoms” and “First Love.” I enjoy reading about awful, sickening people, and these books are filled with them. But they’re awful and sickening in a way that, while not unfamiliar to my life experience, felt new — they’re awful and sickening in a way I’d not seen in literature before.
Can a great book be badly written?
It depends on what you mean by bad. There is such a thing as a text being emotionally effective in spite of the author’s apparent disinterest in composition or editing; if we’re talking about this manner of bad, then I suppose a great book can be badly written. But if you mean simply shabby, or written by an incurious person with a tin ear and lacking all talent for pleasing sentence construction, then no, I don’t believe it can. For some of us, the shape and sound of a line is as important as its content.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
I bought a book called “The Loser,” by William Hoffman Jr., based on its incredible cover (Funk & Wagnalls hardcover edition circa 1968). It’s a memoir of Hoffman’s gambling addiction, which eclipses all aspects of his otherwise healthy life and leads to a state of grisly degradation. It’s nothing like a masterpiece, but it’s well and sensibly told, the story drawn in a pleasing, plain tone. Especially memorable are the passages where Hoffman describes the outsize role of Luck in the life of a gambler, and the gambler’s never-ending pursuit to identify it before it manifests. In telling his story Hoffman affects a remorseful attitude but you can sense the addict still present in the narration — some tamped-down piece of the man wants to place another bet.
What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?
The ideal is a book that is inspirational in its excellence but completely unrelated to whatever it is I’m working on.
Have your reading tastes changed over time?
Yes, and in the commonest way. In the beginning, in the eager style of the junior apprentice, I cast a wide net, reading anything I felt I was supposed to read. Oftentimes this led to unhappiness, which I had a tendency to endure because of some notion that an apprentice was meant to be partly miserable. At some point I realized the error of my ways and now I read only books that please me, and at the very first sense of drudgery I fling the offending text into the fire and it’s on to the next. Life is not so short as they say, but it’s too short to suffer in our leisure and entertainments.
Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?
Yes, both. I’m thinking of the phase at the start of a romantic relationship where you swap all your favorite books. There have been times where this has led to a deepening of the romance and there have been times where it has hastened the romance’s demise.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
I read “Easily Slip Into Another World,” by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards, and learned that in the 1950s the Sun Ra Arkestra rehearsed after hours in a wild game meat market in Chicago. Deer and boar and raccoon and bear carcasses hanging from the ceiling while the Arkestra played, I like to imagine, “Angels and Demons at Play.”
What’s the best book you’ve received as a gift?
I’m the wrong person to buy books for because I’m a bad book receiver. When someone gives me a book, I can’t shake the feeling they’re horning in on my quest; and in the same way I wouldn’t want to write a novel based on someone else’s idea, I’m disinclined to make room for a book someone tells me I have to read. It gets awkward at Christmas, but it doesn’t have to be: friends, the best present, so far as I’m concerned, is not a book at all but a gift certificate to a used-book store.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
I wish authors would write less about the innate nobility of the indomitable human spirit and more about failure without redemption, or the murky zone in between failure and getting by, where many of us live in real life.
Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally, or intellectually?
Emotionally!
How do you organize your books?
By cover color — just kidding. I like big teetering stacks, which are pleasing to the eye and which lead to the very exciting high-pressure solo activity of removing a book from the bottom third of the stack while trying not to bring the whole tower down upon one’s head.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Just me and Emily Dickinson at a sushi train. She wouldn’t have experienced sushi before, and I think she’d find it fascinating.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
Possibly I’m not cooperating with the spirit of the question but if the story had to be written I’d just as soon do it myself.
What do you plan to read next?
I’ve got a little on-deck stack: “Romance in Marseille,” by Claude McKay, “The Murderer,” by Roy Heath, “Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting,” by Penelope Mortimer, “The Fifth Child,” by Doris Lessing, and “The Death of Jim Loney,” by James Welch.
Patrick deWitt Would Like to Eat Sushi With Emily Dickinson - The New York Times
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