Jonathan Stroud

Jonathan Stroud is the author of the Bartimaeus Trilogy and other books.

After I read Susan O'Doherty's enthusiastic praise for Stroud's work, I got in touch and asked him what he was reading. His reply:

At any one time I tend to have several books on the go, ones which I am dipping into for research purposes, or just on a whim, and ones that I am seriously trying to read properly. It's a fairly chaotic scene, and usually I feel pretty guilty about not reading more than I do. At the moment one of the titles on my desk is an old favourite, Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino. I'm writing a novel which is going to have some folktaleish pieces embedded in it, and in order to remind myself of the flavour such things ought to have, I'm checking out this fine collection. It's a vast and brilliant mix of oral history, literary scholarship and modern storytelling. Calvino aimed to create for his own nation a collection equal to the Grimms' famous work; as such he spent years gathering tales from all over Italy, checking variants, choosing the best and most representative, and then rewriting them to give them a unified tone. He provides notes on each one, explaining what he did and why, and this is part of the joy, together with the pungent earthiness, the humour, violence, beauty and magic of the stories themselves. Highly recommended for anyone who likes such things. Hopefully it'll inspire me when I come to attempt my own fragments...

On a similar quest I've also been reading some of the Icelandic Sagas, which though written in the thirteenth century (or thereabouts) are often amazingly modern in the realism they bring to relationships, character and scene. Mind you, they're often not above throwing the odd troll or evil ghost into the equation also, which appeals. I've recently read Njal's Saga for the first time, and reread my personal favourite, Grettir's Saga, with its doomed, swashbuckling hero. I love the vitality, the sinewyness in this northern tradition.

On a completely different note, at bedtime I'm currently wading through the biography of Evelyn Waugh by Selina Hastings, which is hugely readable and for some reason is perfect for that hazy period just before sleep. Waugh is a very odd fish, and his books, though stylistically brilliant, often somehow lacking at the last analysis: reading the life one senses a certain absence that he was aware of in himself, a dissatisfaction that made him prone to depression and general unhappiness, but he wrote beautifully nonetheless, and in Men at Arms (first part of the Sword of Honour trilogy) turned out one of the funniest extended sequences I've ever read (involving something called a 'thunder-box'; I say no more).

I'm also in the middle of a lovely out-of-print autobiography by E Nesbit, one of the first stars of children's literature. It's called Once When I Was Very Young. I found it in a local second-hand bookshop, and it's really charming, giving details of her mid-19th century girlhood, together with enchanting illustrations by Edward Ardizonne. It's the kind of unexpected pleasure one goes into second-hand bookshops for. Ardizonne also turns up in some of the books I'm reading to my three-year-old daughter before bed, chief among them his great Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain.

Visit Jonathan Stroud's website to learn more about his work.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Michael Parker

Alan Michael Parker's five collections of poems include the forthcoming Elephants & Butterflies. He teaches at Davidson College and in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Bruce Smith’s poems have been by my bedside for some time, his resplendent diction always gratifying. I’ve read a couple of his collections, and of late, I’ve been re-reading Songs for Two Voices; there, I greatly admire the conceptual problems he sets for himself. Smart, smart.

Giuliana Bruno’s Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts considers museum architecture and film-viewing in terms of spectatorship. I like quite a few of the essays in the volume, particularly “Fashions of Living.” The ideas there relate glancingly to a book I’m writing about art and space.

I’ve just finished Michael Chabon’s latest, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The novel’s as energetic as the characters are dissipated, which seems to me technically risky. Plus the novel’s an astonishing work of speculative fiction, so when it succeeds, my assumptions about history are called into question.

Finally, I’ve just started Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. So far, the book’s a very entertaining portrait of a thief, amid broad considerations of maps, map-making, map connoisseurship, and the collector’s fetishism.

Visit Alan Michael Parker's website to learn more about his writing.

Read, or listen to him read, his poem "I Have Been Given a Baseball..." in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arthur Allen

Arthur Allen is a Washington-based journalist who has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate and Salon.

His latest book is Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I've been reading a lot of articles from Science, Journal of Infectious Diseases, and New Scientist that had been piling up on my desk for the several months. I just read one of the most remarkable pieces of reporting I've seen this year, by the courageous Jon Lee Anderson, in this week's New Yorker. Anderson describes the U.S. efforts to eradicate opium in Afghanistan, where the poppy is fueling the Taliban's return. It's a kaleidoscopic picture of U.S. mercenaries, wimpy Dutch NATO forces, alliances of convenience and crafty and corrupt Afghans. Told in a completely understated fashion.

My next project is a book about the tomato in history, sort of, so I've been reading foodie books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It being summer, I've also engaged in the relaxing art of book roulette. This means wandering into a summer rental or a friend's house, picking up things that look interesting, and reading them. For example Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest, and, implausibly, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which I had never read. I found it as compelling as a non-believer can, I guess. Also I just read Michael Chabon's clever new detective novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

Among the praise for Arthur Allen's Vaccine:

"Arthur Allen's fantastic new book Vaccine ... is more entertaining than any book about shots has a right to be."
--David Plotz, author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank

"As more children go unvaccinated in the United States, there has been a rise in vaccine-preventable diseases. Meanwhile, fewer pharmaceutical companies are now producing vaccines, citing the high cost of testing, diminishing markets and a fear of litigation. For Allen, a reversal of these trends will require something long overdue: a frank national discussion about the risks and benefits of vaccination. His splendid book is a smart place to begin."
--David Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story, New York Times Book Review

The Page 69 Test: Vaccine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Zegart

Amy Zegart is an Associate Professor at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses in U.S. foreign policy and public management, and the author of the forthcoming Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11.

Earlier this week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Right now, I am carting around Tim Weiner's tome, Legacy of Ashes, which just came out. It is a scholarly masterpiece and in my view will be the definitive history of the CIA. Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from the New York Times, makes use of thousands of pages of recently declassified documents and on the record interviews with scores of intelligence officials. This is no small feat; relatively few insiders criticize the CIA out loud, and fewer still are willing to be named. Though I have some bones to pick with him (he tends to see individuals and their personalities as pivotal; I find them largely irrelevant), the book is richly researched and wickedly written. My favorite line so far is Weiner's description of Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the 3rd director of the burgeoning CIA: "He exuded insignificance."

The next two books on my to-read list are far afield from the CIA: Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think -- which examines the psychology of medical judgment errors -- and Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein. I desperately avoided science as a child, but am fascinated by how scientists invent, think, and recover from failures.

Sad to say I steer clear of the fiction section of the book store entirely, and always have.

Amy Zegart has been featured by The National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform.

She worked on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council staff in 1993, served as a foreign policy advisor to the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign, and has testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Her research focuses on the design problems of U.S. national security agencies. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, where she studied under Condoleezza Rice. Her first book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC (Stanford University Press, 1999), won the highest national dissertation award in Political Science and has become standard reading for several U.S. military and intelligence training programs.

Read more about her forthcoming book Spying Blind at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai and China's Brave New World — And Other Tales for Global Times.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

If you were to ask me a month from now what I’d been reading lately, I hope that I’d be able to tell you that I’d just enjoyed the latest offerings of two of my favorite mystery writers and one of my favorite essayists. This is because the books on my to-read list for an upcoming vacation are Reginald Hill’s Death Comes to the Fat Man (a Dalziel and Pascoe mystery), Ian Rankin’s The Naming of the Dead (featuring John Rebus), and Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. I’m eager to make return visits to the always fascinating milieus of Hill’s Yorkshire and Rankin’s Edinburgh — and Fadiman’s book will also involve a “revisit” of sorts, as I first read some of the pieces it contains when they appeared in The American Scholar, during her inspiring tenure as that magazine’s editor.

Since you asked me now, though, I’ve got a less surprising answer to give: I’ve been reading a lot of works about China. At the moment, in fact, I’m midway through two very different sorts of China-themed biographies, alternating which I pick up depending on my mood. One, published last fall, is John Pomfret’s poignant Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China. It is structured around the life stories of some of the people that the author (who went on to do some great reporting for the Washington Post as its Beijing bureau chief) encountered when he studied at Nanjing University in the early 1980s. The opening chapters have made for compelling but also sometimes disturbing reading, devoted as they are to recounting the varied difficulties that Pomfret’s future classmates underwent during the Cultural Revolution.

The other book I’m midway through is an advance copy of Jonathan Spence’s Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man, due out from Penguin in September. It, too, deals largely with a period of upheaval (the decade of the 1640s that witnessed the fall of the Ming Dynasty that the book’s protagonist, Zhang Dai, both served and wrote about), but its tone is generally light. Spence is a wonderful biographer and this latest book, which takes us into the mental world of a talented writer, is a match for anything he’s done when it comes to the elegance of its prose — and for me that is saying a lot as his earlier writings helped inspire me to make Chinese history my specialty. Some of Return to Dragon Mountain’s most striking parts so far find Spence evocatively recounting the love that Zhang Dai had for spectacles, ranging from theatrical performances involving mock battles (the only kind of warfare he knew until the battles between Ming loyalists and the newly formed Qing Dynasty neared his home) to lavish displays of lanterns that temporarily transformed nearby hillsides into brightly lit fairylands.

Before starting these two books, I’d spent several weeks immersed in reading what might be called the “competition”: three just-published works that, like my China’s Brave New World — And Other Tales for Global Times, try to help non-specialists make sense of the confusing changes currently taking place in the People’s Republic. Two are by journalists who, like Pomfret, have Chinese language skills and have spent extended amounts of time covering China: Duncan Hewitt (formerly of the BBC) and Rob Gifford (of NPR). The third is by a political scientist, Susan Shirk, whose biography includes a short trip to China in the early 1970s (as part of one of the first American student delegations to visit the PRC) and a stint in the State Department.

I was relieved to discover that, despite some overlaps (all of us try, for example, to unravel the thorny issue of the nature of contemporary Chinese nationalism), there were plenty of things relating to style and substance that set China’s Brave New World off from each “competing” book. But I was equally relieved to find that I could learn much from each of the three books and find things to admire about each author. In Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, Hewitt proves adept at using material gleaned from interviews with a range of individuals to give a human face to a complex problem. In China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power, Gifford makes for an engaging traveling companion as he takes his readers through a diverse set of Chinese locales. And in China: Fragile Superpower, Shirk makes the most of her combination of social science acumen and firsthand experience of U.S. actions during recent diplomatic crises. If this is indeed the “competition,” then I feel I am in very good company.

In addition to the books he has written and edited, Jeffrey Wasserstrom is regular contributor to academic journals. He has also written for a variety of general interest periodicals, including Newsweek, The Nation, the TLS, New Left Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.

Read more about Wasserstrom's China's Brave New World — And Other Tales for Global Times.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies as well as many journal articles and book chapters. He and Arnold Kling edit the weblog EconLog.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

In social science, I've just finished Kathleen Jamieson's Everything You Think You Know About Politics... And Why You're Wrong, John Lott's Freedomnomics, Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist, and an advance copy of Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist.

I'm reading several books in educational psychology on "Transfer of Learning," but to be honest their titles are almost inter-changeable.

And since I dream of branching out from economics to graphic novels (see my Amore Infernale on my webpage), I freely admit that I just finished Writers on Comics Scriptwriting by Mark Salisbury - and just RE-read Brian Vaughan's Y: The Last Man (volume 9) and Bill Willingham's Fables (volume 2). With some luck, I'll get their autographs at Comic-Con - anyone else going?

From the Princeton University Press website:

The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

"Caplan offers readers a delightful mixture of economics, political science, psychology, philosophy, and history to resolve a puzzle that, at one time or another, has intrigued every student of public policy."
--N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University, former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara J. King

Barbara J. King is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary and author of, most recently, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion.

Earlier this week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Summers in hot humid hazy Virginia are made for reading. The book I have just read is Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. The twins, Henry and Owen, are Doerr’s and his wife Shauna’s; the insomnia is Doerr’s alone; the funeral was that of Pope John Paul. If I held the job of Subtitler to Excellent Writers, I’d have squeezed in there “on writing,” because Doerr captures so well the process of starting a book on one topic only to find that other interests powerfully assert themselves, and “on learning to see the world,” because the book exquisitely conveys the process of coming alive to one’s surroundings and seeing, really seeing, the little things in the natural world and the built one.

Before the Doerr, I read Caitlin O’Connell’s The Elephant’s Secret Sense, another non-fiction book. A scientist who worked for many years in Namibia in southern Africa, O’Connell writes compellingly on subjects ranging from encounters with lions to her discovery that elephants use their feet (yes, their feet) to communicate (for details, see my July features column at www.bookslut.com).

Don’t think I’m neglecting fiction! My friend Stephen, who has known me forever and well, insisted I read Jonathan Tropper’s The Book of Joe. It totally absorbed me. Joe, at 30-something, returns to his home town, his dying father, a friend who turns out too to be dying, his estranged brother, and his first and only love. How Joe finds a path back to himself is a story imagined with the best balance of dark humor, warmth, and Springsteen lyrics.

I also read The Sea Lady, which may be my favorite-ever Margaret Drabble novel, and that’s saying a lot. The language shimmers, right along with the marine-biology theme. The story involves two English ex-lovers, now meeting again in their older age. Drabble enlivens Ailsa and Humphrey with such genuine human strengths and weaknesses, I was entirely happy living in their world for a few days.

OK, I’ve got to stop here: the 50 pages left to go in John Connolly’s The Unquiet are calling to me. As beautifully creepy, well-written thrillers go, this one in Connolly’s Charlie Parker series is way cool.

"Evolving God (Doubleday, 2007)," King explains, "explores the deepest roots of the human religious imagination, using the behaviors of African apes (including empathy and compassion) as clues to the behaviors of early human ancestors, then tracing the development of religious ritual through the Neandertals through the cave artists of our own species."

Salon published an interview with King about the central ideas in Evolving God, followed by an audio link at the end to an NPR interview.

The Page 69 Test: Evolving God.

My Book, The Movie: Evolving God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Morgan

An award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, Robin Morgan has published more than 20 books.

I recently asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Re-re-re-reading (it's an evergreen) Ursula K. Le Guin's profound, hilarious, gender-free, and exquisitely written transliteration of Lao Tzu's The Tao Te Ching (Shambala). In prose and poetry, nonfiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and realistic fiction -- Le Guin is just one hell of a fine writer, and this book is a keeper-by-the-bedside challenge and comfort.

Also I'm plowing through The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Belknap/Harvard) -- a must-read for poets, readers of poetry, and people who are as interested in form as in formlessness.

A Tranquil Star, by Primo Levi -- the previously unpublished stories (Norton); I read Levi for the sense of unease he provokes by whatever he writes, even spilling over through the translations.

Last, Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Houghton Mifflin) is a delight -- fact filled, informative, and a really fun read since Angier, science columnist for the New York Times, writes in a lively, accessible, yet never simplistic style.

Morgan's books include six collections of poetry, four works of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. Her latest books include Saturday’s Child: A Memoir, her best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, and her new novel, The Burning Time, about women fighting the Inquisition. Her most recent book is a nonfiction work, Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right.

The Demon Lover made Richard K. Morgan's list of "Essential Reading for Modern Humans: Six Books That Will Change the Way You View the World (Though You May Not Thank Them for It)."

Visit Robin Morgan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Silva

Mark Silva is the White House Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Readers who miss his byline in the Trib (or in the Los Angeles Times or Newsday or in another Tribune paper) might catch his reporting at The Swamp, the blog of the Trib's Washington bureau.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am reading Einstein, by Walter Isaacson, which I have been working on for a while because it's too heavy, and I mean in pounds, to travel with. So while I work on it at home, I have been reading other books on the road. I am working on Jim Harrison's newest novel now.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Campion

Peter Campion is Assistant Professor of English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He is the author of a collection of poems, Other People (University of Chicago Press), and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson (Terrence Rogers Fine Art).

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm up in Vermont where my wife's family lives. It's gorgeous: the skies a postcard blue, the green so green it's searing. And yet I seem to have spent most of my time inside, reading.

I finished The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. I love his plotting, the way he gets his characters to balance, for hundreds of pages at a time, on the fulcrum of their own psychologies. Trollope is a new favorite. I'm inchworming my way through the Palliser novels. (To be honest, I'm not sure how many more fox hunts I can handle).

Then I read Henning Mankell's Before the Frost. With mysteries I usually skim the filler -- the fluff about romance, family, pets, etc. -- and "cut to the chase." But Mankell does a fine job all around. His famous detective, Kurt Wallander, joins up with his daughter Linda; and the interplay between them deepens the admittedly sensationalistic plot.

I also read Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics. It's structured as an interview. The French philosopher asks how can art be emancipatory. I'm particularly fascinated by his concept of "the distribution of the sensible." He claims that as creatures who live inside political structures our experience is always already channeled, structured by larger forces. One thing that art does is to rearrange these structures and redistribute the sensible.

I thought I was done with French theorists. But then on Sunday we drove to my friend, the painter Eric Aho's studio. I'm writing a catalog essay for a show of Eric's -- a genuine pleasure. I wanted to see the paintings in person one more time. Eric was away but he left his studio open, and there on a chair, a gift: Gilles Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. I read it yesterday, in one swoop -- I'm sure I missed some of the subtleties. Deleuze manages to combine his theorizing with superb formal examination of the paintings. I wish more theorists had that skill.

Oh, I've also been immersed in Caroline Bingham's Big Book of Trucks. My two year old son and six year old nephew know this book backwards and forwards, from grille to trailer hitch. Talk about the logic of sensation!

Peter Campion has held a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lecturership at Stanford University. His poetry and prose have appeared recently in The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Parnassus, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tikkun, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His monograph on the painter Joseph McNamara was published by The Seven Bridges Foundation, and his catalog essay on the painter Terry St. John was published by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery.

Read -- or hear Campion read -- his poems "Lilacs," "Poem to Fire," and "Other People" in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue