Now, if you’re like me, this may very well be your favorite expert interview. Not only are we talking about books, but we’re talking with Time Magazine’s book critic about books. Does it get better than that? Whether you’re looking for some good book re-commendations or you just want to see what literary genius, Lev Grossman, likes to read, you’re sure to love this post!
Name: Lev Grossman
Age: 40
Official job title: Book Critic
Company: Time Magazine
Kate: Hi Lev. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about literature. I’m so excited to have you, so let’s get started…What is your favorite book of all time?
Lev: Now that is not an easy question. I’ll just be honest: Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Kate: Classic. As the book critic for Time, I’m sure you spend a lot of time reading. What is your favorite thing about literature?
Lev: That you can say things in novels, important things, that you could never express in conversation. Or in any other medium for that matter.
Kate: And what is your favorite genre of literature?
Lev: Literary fiction.
Kate: And what are five fiction books that everybody should read before they graduate?
Lev:
1. Virginia Woolf, MRS. DALLOWAY
2. Ernest Hemingway, THE SUN ALSO RISES
3. Gustave Flaubert, MADAME BOVARY
Kate: Do you have a favorite bookstore?
Lev: There is no bookstore in my neighborhood, which is a terrible shame. I’d have to say that my Newtonville Books, in Newtonville, Mass., is my favorite.
Kate: That is a shame. What are five non-fiction books that everybody should read before they graduate?
Lev: I pick these books not because they are the five greatest books ever written, or the most important — you’d have to be insane to think that — but because these are great books that people will actually finish, and subsequently remember, and be transformed by, and reread.
1. Douglas Hofstadter’s GODEL ESCHER BACH
3. Vladimir Nabokov, SPEAK, MEMORY
4. Ernest Hemingway, A MOVEABLE FEAST
5. George Orwell, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
Kate: What types of literature do you feel are most important to be reading in your twenties?
Lev: Long books. The classics. When you’re older you won’t have the time or the patience to finish them. Trust me on this.
Kate: Which books do you feel have taught you the most?
Lev: Personally? I can’t overstate how much I learned from Douglas Hofstadter’s GODEL ESCHER BACH, which I read before I was old enough to really understand it, but somehow that didn’t matter. (I’m probably still not old enough to understand it.) T.H. White’s THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING is a book I’ve probably read more times than any other, and it still shapes the way I use language, and think about the past. Beyond that it’s the modernists: Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY, Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES, Joyce’s ULYSSES. I read those books at a deeply formative moment in my life, and fell in love with them permanently the way one does with books only a few times in one’s life. Even when I’m not thinking about them, I’m thinking about them.
Kate: If you could recommend one book to recent graduates, what would it be?
Lev: You know what I’m reading right now? Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes. Terrible title, but it’s actually the most exciting book I’ve read in years. It’s about science in the Romantic period, at the end of the 18th century, when no one knew what they were doing, and people would try anything, and in the end history was made by a bunch of misfits and nobodies who trusted their own instincts. That’s something I wish I’d done as a recent graduate: trusted my own instincts.
Kate: I’m so intrigued. One problem I run into with reading is the expense of books. Have you learned any tips along the way about how to save money on books, without simply going to the public library?
Lev: Buy them used? Borrow them? That’s about all you can do. But it’s worth it. My tip is to save money on something else.
Kate: That’s about all I’ve come up with myself. Any other words of wisdom about literature that you think is important for us youngins’ to know?
Lev: There are two things I wish I’d known as a recent graduate.
1. Nobody thought I was the best writer around when I was in college. People thought I was clever, and had some talent, but I wasn’t one of the real stars. But I wound up making a career as a writer — and some of the real stars didn’t — because I kept at it. I refused to quit. I finished articles and books and turned them in and kept on writing. That’s what made the difference: I wasn’t smarter, or more talented, I just refused to give up.
2. I’m a professional journalist, and a reasonably successful one, but I didn’t write a word of journalism till I was 30. Plenty of my friends found their careers right out of college. While I temped, and interned, and went to grad school, and dropped out of grad school, and sweated through some really lousy, uninteresting jobs for years and years, they were getting promoted and buying houses. I thought I was finished. But eventually — 9 years after college — I got a job that I liked. And now that I’m 40, it doesn’t matter about those lost years, particularly. We’re all doing fine. I guess the lesson there is: don’t panic. You have way more time than you think you do.
