Reading Questionnaire
I recently answered a questionnaire by an Israeli publisher about my favorite books and reading habits, and I thought this might be good place to post my answers.
1) What are your favorite books?
There’s a long list of authors who, once I discover them, I feel like I have to read everything that they’d ever written, these include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Hanoch Levin, Flannery O’Connor, Max Frisch, J. M. Coetzee, Roberto Bolaño, Nathanael West, Yaakov Shabtai, Raymond Carver, Miguel de Unamuno, and Herman Melville.
There are other authors like Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K. Dick, and Ernest Hemingway, where I was initially enthusiastic but after reading some of their less successful works that enthusiasm had diminished.
Finally, there are also Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Andre Breton’s Nadja, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Aaron Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939.
2) What are your favorite children’s books?
As a child I was a big fan of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven, the books of Roald Dahl, and later Gerald Durrell. I still have a volume from childhood where Erich Kästner retells the stories of Baron Münchhausen, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, Gulliver, and others and I occasionally read stories from it to my kids.
As a parent I also like the collaborations between Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, but when I’m desperate for my kids to go to sleep I prefer books that can be read in under two minutes like Good Night Gorilla.
3) What books made you wonder what all the fuss was about?
There are more than a few average (or terrible) books that somehow wound up on those “best books of the 20th century” lists, and I suspect their inclusion has more to do with publishers that put out those lists (perhaps one day I’ll write about that in greater detail). I’m specifically thinking of books like The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, and Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. I also never understood the fuss about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or anything by Jonathan Safran Foer.
4) What books inspired you?
It’s not difficult to find the influence Albert Camus had on a book like Lazaretto, or the effect the playwright Hanoch Levin had on my plays, but I’m often inspired by books which are not necessarily my favorites, but rather books where I found an interesting idea that I would do differently (or books that make me so mad that I have to respond to them), this is not always a conscious process, Harold Bloom would probably identify it as the anxiety of influence.
5) And finally – how do you choose which books to read? Is it important for you to add books written by women and/or various minorities and cultures to your reading list?
Beyond the authors mentioned above, I have a long list of books I’ve gathered over the years and that list grows longer by the day. It’s important for me to read the “big” authors I’ve never read, if only to know they’re not my style. I also try to be diverse in terms of countries, cultures, periods, and genres.
On the other hand, I don’t like the demand to prefer certain writers simply because they belong to a certain gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, it feels like a very condescending approach. You shouldn’t read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to reach some quota of Black writing, you should read it because it’s one of the greatest novels ever written by any man;
the stories of Flannery O’Connor and Silvina Ocampo aren’t waiting for you to do them any favors and read them, they’ll just punch in the gut and leave you curled up on the floor, and you shouldn’t be reading Edward Albee because he’s gay, you should be reading him because he’s a brilliant playwright with amazing insight into all human relationships.
1) What are your favorite books?
There’s a long list of authors who, once I discover them, I feel like I have to read everything that they’d ever written, these include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Hanoch Levin, Flannery O’Connor, Max Frisch, J. M. Coetzee, Roberto Bolaño, Nathanael West, Yaakov Shabtai, Raymond Carver, Miguel de Unamuno, and Herman Melville.There are other authors like Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K. Dick, and Ernest Hemingway, where I was initially enthusiastic but after reading some of their less successful works that enthusiasm had diminished.
Finally, there are also Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Andre Breton’s Nadja, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Aaron Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939.
2) What are your favorite children’s books?
As a child I was a big fan of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven, the books of Roald Dahl, and later Gerald Durrell. I still have a volume from childhood where Erich Kästner retells the stories of Baron Münchhausen, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, Gulliver, and others and I occasionally read stories from it to my kids.
As a parent I also like the collaborations between Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, but when I’m desperate for my kids to go to sleep I prefer books that can be read in under two minutes like Good Night Gorilla.
3) What books made you wonder what all the fuss was about?
There are more than a few average (or terrible) books that somehow wound up on those “best books of the 20th century” lists, and I suspect their inclusion has more to do with publishers that put out those lists (perhaps one day I’ll write about that in greater detail). I’m specifically thinking of books like The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, and Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. I also never understood the fuss about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or anything by Jonathan Safran Foer.
4) What books inspired you?
It’s not difficult to find the influence Albert Camus had on a book like Lazaretto, or the effect the playwright Hanoch Levin had on my plays, but I’m often inspired by books which are not necessarily my favorites, but rather books where I found an interesting idea that I would do differently (or books that make me so mad that I have to respond to them), this is not always a conscious process, Harold Bloom would probably identify it as the anxiety of influence.
5) And finally – how do you choose which books to read? Is it important for you to add books written by women and/or various minorities and cultures to your reading list?
Beyond the authors mentioned above, I have a long list of books I’ve gathered over the years and that list grows longer by the day. It’s important for me to read the “big” authors I’ve never read, if only to know they’re not my style. I also try to be diverse in terms of countries, cultures, periods, and genres.
On the other hand, I don’t like the demand to prefer certain writers simply because they belong to a certain gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, it feels like a very condescending approach. You shouldn’t read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to reach some quota of Black writing, you should read it because it’s one of the greatest novels ever written by any man;
the stories of Flannery O’Connor and Silvina Ocampo aren’t waiting for you to do them any favors and read them, they’ll just punch in the gut and leave you curled up on the floor, and you shouldn’t be reading Edward Albee because he’s gay, you should be reading him because he’s a brilliant playwright with amazing insight into all human relationships.
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