Roger Sandall

Roger Sandall is an anthropologist whose essays have appeared in a number of international journals.

Michael Crichton once chose Sandall's 2001 book The Culture Cult as one of the “five best books” in the past twenty years about the social effects of romantic primitivism.

I overcame my envy about his living at Bondi Beach and asked him what he's been reading. His reply:

(1) A new biography of Descartes that tries to explain the Thirty Years’ War first…. Hey, not even that — the CAUSES of the Thirty Year’s War! He’s 22, and on page 52 it’s still the Defenestration of Prague.

(2) Uncle Vanya. Big fuss downunder about the MALY Theatre’s production. They’re Russian aren’t they from St Petersburg so it’s gotta be good. But there’s something wrong when reading Chekhov brings tears to your eyes and the play itself is a yawn. Vanya’s too drunk and drunks are boring. Drunks CANNOT be tragic or seriously comic either. That of course is Russia’s problem too. Anyone know some really good writing on Chekhov?

(3) Four sentences and here they are: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Cool. That’s what famous journalist John Gunther wrote in 1936 about the manmade famine in the Ukraine that killed around 7 million. You see it was okay and all in the cause of progress because they really killed themselves. Now you don’t believe me do you? You think I’m making it up. But that’s what he says on page 470 of the 1938 edition of Inside Europe. He got it from his good friend Walter Duranty.

Gunther says the peasants resisted Stalin; Stalin struck back; ergo, the peasants ‘killed themselves.’ It’s a warning to us all. (Inside Europe sold over half a million copies and went through lots of versions from 1936 on and you might have to hunt around a bit in Chapter XXXV, just before the section ‘Stalin the human being.’ But there those sentences are.)

Visit Roger Sandall's website, The Culture Cult.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning British poet and author of at least six books of non-fiction.

Her book Tigers in Red Weather has just been been shortlisted for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize in non-fiction, for books that promote understanding of South Asia.

I asked her what she's been reading. Her reply:

I’m reading a new collection of poems by Laurie Sheck, Captivity (Alfred A Knopf), and in love with the fineness and stillness of the language. It is punctuated with poems for what she calls “removes”, moments when slaves are in new places and have to learn new words. I wish it had appeared in time for me to include a poem from it in my latest book on reading modern poetry, The Poem and the Journey.

Also The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U (Faber & Faber, UK) An account of Burma's history that has led to the tragedy of now. I did go there in 2003, when researching my tiger book, but only to teach poetry and interview a biologist, not into jungle. At that time Aung Aan Suu Kyi was out of house arrest, and I had tea with her: it was her day for being vegetarian, and she hunted out the cucumber sandwiches. Everyone thought, then, the junta was going to allow more democracy. What’s happened since has been worse and worse. This book is erudite and very moving.

And how does it feel to be nominated for the Kiriyama Prize?

I’m glad, because it is about people as much as anmals - I tried hard to understand each culture that lives with the tiger. For all of them, their problems are much greater than how to look after the tiger. In Burma, it was worst of all. But the tiger, and the wildness and wilderness it stands for, still matters, even there.

Padel put Tigers in Red Weather to the Page 69 Test last year.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Haywood Henderson

William Haywood Henderson is the author of three novels, Native, The Rest of the Earth, and Augusta Locke, which was released by Viking in April 2006 and is out this month in paperback.

Since 2002 he has taught novel writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:

I’ve been teaching a lot of creative writing workshops, so I’ve been reading student manuscripts, mostly novels-in-progress. I work primarily with advanced writers, and these novels can be quite beautiful and engaging — anything from a haunting tale of the dirty war in Argentina to the life of an Indian scout on the plains in the 1800s.

The most recent published novels I finished were by authors I met at the Montana Festival of the Book: And She Was, by Cindy Dyson, and High Country, by Willard Wyman. Both are wonderful reads, full of the beauty of the West, Alaska for Dyson and Montana and the Sierra Nevada for Wyman. High Country won the Spur Award (from the Western Writers of America) for best first novel and best novel. Oh, and I also read Persuasion, by Jane Austen (she wasn’t at the Montana Festival).

With all of my teaching, I haven’t been able to finish any books lately, but I have a few books at various stages of completion. First, there’s The Sea, by John Banville, which I picked for its pretty cover (well, almost) and because it won the Man Booker Prize; I’ve never found a Man Booker Prize winner I didn’t like. I’m about halfway through Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner, a book that I’d somehow missed reading over the years. I’m enjoying This Cold Heaven — Seven Seasons in Greenland, by Gretel Ehrlich. And at bedtime I’ve been dabbling in Unfinished Tales, by J.R.R. Tolkien, to escape from the disasters of the modern world into the disasters of the mythical past.

Henderson applied the Page 69 Test to Augusta Locke last year.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Deemer

Charles Deemer is a writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:

It's that time of year when most of my reading time is devoted to student screenplays. However, last weekend I flew to L.A. to see the opera Mahagonny (a stellar production!) and began Robert Stone's Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties and am loving it. I returned to learn my mystery Dead Body In A Small Room is a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year finalist; I opened it and started reading and happily can't set it down. It's amazing how much you forget even though you wrote the damn thing!

Since the subject is reading, let me say that this summer I am beginning a reading project I've been putting off for too long. I'm reading, back to back, Chapman's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, followed by Kazantzakis' Sequel to the Odyssey. This ought to keep me busy for a while.

Visit the Oregon Literary Review and Deemer's blog The Writing Life II, and learn more about Seven Plays, a 2001 Oregon Book Award finalist, and Dead Body In A Small Room.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes is the author of seven books -- including Guitar: An American Life -- and numerous articles that appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Outside, the Boston Globe, American History and some 50 other publications. He is a contributing editor for the U.S. Airways magazine Attache and has been a regular essayist for National Public Radio since 1989.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:

Interesting timing. The question "What is Tim Brookes reading?" is, at the moment, inextricably tied up with the question "How is Tim Brookes reading?" as I'm recovering from laser eye surgery for a partially detached retina. The current method of post-operative treatment includes putting (don't ask me how -- I'm sparing you the details) a bubble of some unspecified gas into the eye, to act like a kind of pressure bandage and prevent swelling in the retina. This means that when I look out at the world I see a fat, wobbling, squashy circle in the lower half of my vision. It's like having a small, transparent black balloon moored to my right upper canine. My job is to hold my head at such an angle that the bubble rests over the site of the surgery, which in my case means resting my right ear on my right shoulder. Every time I move my head in the slightest, the bubble bounces and wobbles off on way or the other, and I have to tilt it back into place. It's like being a human carpenter's level.

This radically restricts what I can do. I can't write with a pen or pencil, I can't play the guitar, and pole vaulting is strictly off limits. So I've been litening to books on CD: Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, which like all his book contains individual lines of limpid and startling brilliance; The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, which I solved long before the end and includes more drinking than a walking guide to the distilleries of Scotland, and The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams, a ragtag assembly of bits and pieces left uncollected after his untimely death.

I tried to start an actual book -- a friend sent me the Baroque Trilogy by Neal Stephenson -- but my eyes are still a little sore and the bubble kept getting in the way. It gets in the way when I type, too, so now I'll have to stop and dock my ear back on my shoulder again.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for several of Brookes' books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Son of a Witch, recently talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he was listening to and viewing for entertainment.

And reading:

I'm reading a book called Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs. [It's] not a standard biography. It concentrates fairly exclusively on what she was thinking and doing as she was writing each one of her major works. You learn a lot about where she was living, who she was talking to, but only in so far as they relate to the work in question. I'm now on a chapter about "Mrs. Dalloway." It's a book-by-book assessment of how a person creates using the material of her life. I admire Virginia Woolf enormously.

Read about what Maguire is listening to and watching.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregg Hurwitz

Gregg Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, #1 L.A. Times bestselling author of The Tower, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Kill Clause, The Program, Troubleshooter, and most recently, Last Shot.

I asked him what he's been reading. His reply:

I’ve been playing catch-up on some thriller writers I should have read more of. I took my first dip into the pages of John Sandford with Rules of Prey. He’s got cracking dialogue and wonderful characterization.

And I’m currently reading Trouble Is My Business, one of the only Chandlers I haven’t gotten to. It’s typically brilliant: “He had an idea and he was holding it like a sick baby.”

I’m also digging into Koontz’s Velocity, which not only has a wonderful high-concept hook but is really tightly written. So it’s lots of crime and bloodshed on my bookstand right now.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for Gregg's Last Shot, and visit his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

© Campaign for the American Reader. Reprinted with permission.

David Plotz

David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor and author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.

I asked him what he has been reading. His reply:

Mostly I'm reading the Bible, because I have been blogging it for Slate. I'm in the Book of Ezekiel now, which is the humane, stoner portion of the Old Testament (a testament that is more often pretty ruthless).

For kicks I'm reading Absurdistan, which I'm about a year late getting to, but does feel hilariously, creepily current given the craziness of Russia. I actually don't like it as it deserves to be liked--I'm worn out with the genre of post-Soviet absurdism (Jonathan Safran Foer, etc.).

And I'm dipping into Arthur Allen's fantastic new book Vaccine, which is a history of, uh, vaccines, and is more entertaining than any book about shots has a right to be.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for David's The Genius Factory.

And visit the official Genius Factory website where you can learn more about the book.

Arthur Allen put his book Vaccine to the Page 69 Test.

--Marshal Zeringue

© Campaign for the American Reader. Reprinted with permission.

Libby Fischer Hellmann

Libby Fischer Hellmann's most recent novel is A Shot to Die For, the fourth novel in her award-winning amateur sleuth series featuring Chicago video producer Ellie Foreman.

I recently asked her what she has been reading. Her reply:

I’ve been on a reading binge recently… I think it’s the cold weather. I just finished The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey, and Big City Bad Blood by Sean Chercover. Both debut crime fiction novels by Chicago authors. There’s already been a lot of buzz about Blade, but there should be more about BCBB – it’s beautifully written, and what could have been just another stereotypical PI story becomes fresh and real in Chercover’s hands. Next up is In This Rain by S.J. Rozan and In the Company of Liars by David Ellis.

I’m also catching up on some missed books – I finally read The Devil in White City – what a great read! And I just finished Gregg Hurwitz’s The Program, a disturbing but fascinating story. I’m reading Be Cool by Elmore Leonard, and No Safe Place by Richard North Patterson. And I’m determined to restart Denise Mina’s Field of Blood. (I started it once but got side-tracked).

And yes, I usually have several books going at the same time.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for Libby's A Shot to Die For.

And visit her website where you can will find a link to the short story that started the Ellie Foreman series.

--Marshal Zeringue

© Campaign for the American Reader. Reprinted with permission.

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson has an interesting column in the London Times. She writes, in part:

I have just been reading Captain Cook’s Journals, which made me read Robinson Crusoe again, which made me think about island narratives, and has run me towards Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Marianne Wiggins’s wonderful novel John Dollar and to Diana Souhami’s award-winning Selkirk’s Island, which made me order Coconut Chaos, her new book on Pitcairn.

Read the entire column.

Learn more about Jeanette Winterson's books.

--Marshal Zeringue