Charlie Lovett

Charlie Lovett is a writer, teacher, and playwright, whose plays for children have been seen in more than 3,000 productions. He is a former antiquarian bookseller and an avid book collector. He and his wife split their time between Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Kingham, Oxfordshire, in England.

Lovett's novels include The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession, First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen, and the newly released The Lost Book of the Grail.

Recently I asked Lovett about what he was reading. His reply:

A lot of my reading is related to the projects I will be working on next. To prepare for The Lost Book of the Grail, which is set in the fictional English cathedral city of Barchester, I read Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. Trollope created Barchester for this series, and I loved the books, though at a total of over 3500 pages, they kept me busy for a while.

My next novel is still in the early stages of brainstorming and deep background research, but it has led me to read a lot of early science fiction like Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. I had read Verne as a child, and remembered skipping over those long lists of aquatic creatures to get to the adventurous bits. As an adult reader, I’m afraid I did the same thing. I’d never read Wells before, and was surprised how short these two incredibly influential novels were. Either could be read in an afternoon, and I really enjoyed both of them, especially their tight points of view.

Right now I’m taking a little break from research and reading for fun. I just finished reading the manuscript of a fellow author’s next novel and just started a more recent sci-fi novel called Ready Player One, which an enthusiastic friend has been recommending to me loudly for some months. I’ve never read a lot of sci-fi before, but I’m enjoying it so far.

Visit Charlie Lovett's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Lost Book of the Grail.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Book of the Grail.

--Marshal Zeringue