What books are on your night stand?
Jan Morris’s “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.” It’s about the city she first visited as a soldier after World War II — and about the weirdness of time and history. Also Fernanda Eberstadt’s nervy “Bite Your Friends,” stories of artists and activists who use their bodies to defy the status quo. And Caoilinn Hughes’s “The Alternatives” and Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos,” both up next, that is after I finish “War and Peace.”
What book would people be surprised to find on your shelves?
“Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter,” by Dale Messick.
How do you organize your books?
I don’t. Mine is an orderly disorder: I keep the books I’m reading and using for work near at hand, even if that means on the floor around my desk. As for the rest, my husband, whose organization skills rank among his many gifts, arranges them according to category and then, within those categories, he alphabetizes. His is an orderly order.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
Reading a novel in the wee hours of the morning, when the city is quiet. I curl up on the couch beneath my favorite bookcases, and often stay there until the sky is streaked with morning light.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
That Mary Anning, a young, self-taught fossil hunter, was the first to discover and excavate large dinosaur skeleton fossils near her home in Lyme Regis, England, and became one of the foremost contributors to paleontology.
What do you read to relax?
Relax? Well, often poetry: the strangely consoling Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the witty Emily Dickinson and, recently, Louise Glück. Whitman, too, never fails, even when he’s annoying. Plus, I’ve discovered the addictive mystery writer Tana French.
What are your favorite works of historical fiction?
I never thought I liked historical fiction, but my list is long: Pat Barker’s “Regeneration,” with her depiction of W.H.R. Rivers, the psychiatrist whose paradoxical duty is to heal men shattered by war’s insanity so that they might fight again; Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”; Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”; David Ebershoff’s “The Danish Girl.” But my very favorite is Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” where Hadrian says, “Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.” Then, she adds, “Not all our books will perish.”
What’s the secret to compelling history writing?
No secret but narrative: a dramatic plot, characters, momentum, very strong sentences and, of course, conflict.
What did you believe needed to be known about the Scopes trial that wasn’t already amply discussed in other accounts?
The many political and cultural conditions that made the trial almost inevitable: populism, Prohibition, the labor movement, the slaughter of the Great War, which contributed to the fear of science — and xenophobia and racism in the form of the Red Scare and the Ku Klux Klan. I contend that William Jennings Bryan and the anti-evolutionists were not really arguing about science. Science was the emblem for what we today call a culture war. What’s surprising is that, 100 years on, we’re still fighting the same war.
Is there a supporting character from the trial who deserves more attention?
At least two: Dudley Field Malone, a proud Irish Catholic who worked in Woodrow Wilson’s administration but resigned when Wilson didn’t keep his promise to help pass the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote. And Arthur Garfield Hays, a secular Jew who served for many years as counsel to the A.C.L.U.
What’s the last great book you read?
I just reread George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” though I’m not really embarrassed about that.
What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
Deborah Eisenberg’s darkly antic “Your Duck Is My Duck,” with her pinpoint observations. (Close to my heart: “It’s beginning to look like a photo finish — me first, or the world. It’s not so hard to figure out why I’m not sleeping. What I can’t figure out is why everybody else is sleeping.”)
The last book you read that made you furious?
Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy”: I kept telling Roberta to avoid Clyde, then to dump him, but she wouldn’t listen.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” when I was 9. When I was 11 and down with the flu, my uncle gave me, for some reason, “The Education of Henry Adams” and Edmund Wilson’s “The Scrolls From the Dead Sea.” I still have the books, which I didn’t read until years later.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, so they can discuss, at last, Shakespeare’s sister. A. Philip Randolph, the co-editor of The Messenger (and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), can mediate.
What are you working on next?
A short biography of Fiorello La Guardia for the Yale Series of Jewish Lives. (Yes, he was Jewish on his mother’s side.)
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