In this bonus listen, we're sharing a recording of a live event. Emily talked to super librarian Nancy Pearl about her new book, The Writer's Library, what she learned talking to writers about their reading lives, her pandemic reads, and more.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of the show notes.
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The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to The Desk Set, a bookish podcast for reading broadly. I'm one of your hosts, Emily Calkins, and today we have another special feed drop for you. I had the chance to talk to Super Librarian Nancy Pearl about her new book, The Writer's Library. Please enjoy our conversation.
Emily Calkins:
And now I'm so excited to introduce Nancy Pearl. I don't know if she needs an introduction, but just in case, bestselling author, librarian, literary critic and devoted reader Nancy Pearl speaks about the importance and pleasure of reading at libraries, at literary organizations, she's on NPR, she has a show on the Seattle channel. Among her many other honors are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from Library Journal, the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. She's the creator of the internationally recognized if all of Seattle or all of "insert your town here" read the same book, and possibly coolest, she was the inspiration for the Archie McPhee librarian action figure. So, thank you so much for being with us tonight to talk about your new book, Nancy.
Nancy Pearl:
Emily, thank you so much for inviting me to do this. It's great. I feel like...
Emily Calkins:
My pleasure.
Nancy Pearl:
... King County is one of my very favorite library systems, so I'm always glad to do things for King County.
Emily Calkins:
Well, thank you. So, in the book, you open a lot of the... I guess, can you tell us a little bit about what the book is before we even dive in.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, so The Writer's Library has the subtitle, The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives, and it's a collection of 22 interviews with 23 writers that I did with a good friend of mine, Jeff Schwager, who's a Seattle playwright and writer. We traveled around the country about a year ago, interviewing the majority of these authors in their homes. Some of them, we interviewed at places that meant a lot to them. Louise Erdrich, we interviewed at her bookstore in suburban Minneapolis. Maaza Mengista, we interviewed at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn where she had just had a collection of photographs, a display of photographs that related to her new book, The Shadow King.
Nancy Pearl:
So, it was really, the reason there's a discrepancy, 22 interviews, 23 writers is that Jeff and I interviewed Michael Chabon and his wife, Ayelet Waldman together, sitting around their dining room, kitchen table, drinking tea and eating. They were eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches. So, if that question ever comes up on Jeopardy, what's Michael Chabon's favorite sandwich? It's peanut butter and banana. So, and what we talked to these writers about was not that the books they written, but the books they read and I've always felt that really what you read is who you are. And Osip Mandelstam, I just ran across this quotation recently. Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet, writer said, "If you want to know my biography, ask me about the books I've read." And I think that's so wonderful and so true, and I wish I had had that quote in my head before we started this project.
Emily Calkins:
So, you open most of the interviews by asking writers what books were important to them as children. And so, I'm wondering if you can tell us what books were important to you as a child?
Nancy Pearl:
My gosh. I had this wonderful librarian when I was a kid at my public library in Detroit, Michigan. It was the Parkman Branch Library. And I was one of those, I grew up in a house that that would now be called dysfunctional, but back then, I just knew it wasn't where I wanted to be and it just didn't feel very safe to me. So, I spent all my time at the library and Ms. Whitehead, my librarian at my library, that's how I thought about it. Ms. Whitehead really, really recognized my needs to be... really, she opened the world to me, which is what librarians do. And when she met me, all I read were horse and dog books. I was about eight years old.
Nancy Pearl:
And if you went with me, Emily, to that library today, I could show you on the shelf, we could walk into the children's room and I could show you the shelves where the horse and dog books were kept, because they were pulled out of the fiction section, the kids' fiction section and shelved separately.
Emily Calkins:
Interesting.
Nancy Pearl:
They were shelved separately just for me because [crosstalk 00:05:25] there, but Ms. Whitehead, really... Ms. Whitehead, one day came up to me and she said, "Nancy, would you like to be the very first person in this library to read the new Marguerite Henry horse book?" Well, I mean, how could you... like, "Of course." Like, "My God. I love the Misty of Chincoteague." And here was the new horse book. So, I held out my hands for the new book. And in the first example of like bait and switch that I was ever introduced to, Ms. Whitehead said, "But before you read this, Nancy, here's another book I want you to read."
Nancy Pearl:
And so, by means of doing that over and over again, and of course, I fell for it every time, Ms. Whitehead introduced me to... she was Canadian, so I grew up on a steady diet of British children's literature. So, The Wind and The Willows and Mary Poppins and The Hobbit and The Children of Green, I pronounce it, Knowe, K-N-O-W-E. All of those books Ms. Whitehead gave to me. So, I have very many horse and dog fave still from that period. The Dog Next Door. Bonny's Boy. My gosh. Misty of Chincoteague, all of those books.
Nancy Pearl:
But when Ms. Whitehead introduced me to the Lord of the Rings series, now you can just go to the library and check them out one right after another, you can buy the whole set together, but when I read The Fellowship of the Ring, we had to wait two years for the next book. It was what kids who you were introduced to the Harry Potter books right from the beginning had that time lag. But with the Lord of the Rings, with the Fellowship of the Ring, it ends with Frodo and Sam, running away from Boromir and he's going to kill them. And like, we had to wait two years to find out whether they were going to survive or not.
Nancy Pearl:
So, My Father's Dragon, which my school librarian gave me to read was another favorite. All of those books. [crosstalk 00:07:56]. I mean, I could go on. I love it.
Emily Calkins:
That leads beautifully into my next question, which is that a lot of the writers in the book talk about the fact that as kids, they read genre fiction, right? They read Lord of the Rings, they read lots of science fiction, some of the sort of classic adventures series, both books that were intentionally written for kids and books for adults, like genre fiction for adults. And whether they still read genre was a little more varied. And it's really fascinating to see how people talk about genre fiction. I wonder what you make of the fact that all of these writers who overwhelmingly aren't writing genre fiction now were reading it early on. What do you..?
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that was so surprising was the number of science fiction readers especially as kids and how much science fiction meant to them. I think the author, who was mentioned by most, the writer who most writers referenced as one of their favorite writers was Lorrie Moore, who is a great short story and novelist, but I love her short stories, but the author that the book that so many people said was so important to them was Watership Down. Watership Down, and they just all said it's not a book about... it's not about rabbits, which is what how one would describe it if one were not a fan of Watership Down.
Nancy Pearl:
And Madeline Miller, one of the people that we interviewed, the author, of course, of Circe and Song of Achilles, was one of those people who loved that book and not only loved the book, but she read it, because it was published in 1972 and she read it at the same time that she was really getting introduced to Greek and Roman mythology. So, she read it as a kind of hero myth that the last hundred pages just left her breathless. I mean, when you read what Madeline Miller said about that book, if you haven't read Watership Down, or if like me, you probably read it, but it didn't make any big impression on me, you'll want to go back and re-read it or read it for the first time, because of the way specifically that Madeline talks about it.
Nancy Pearl:
But I think that the genre fiction why it's so popular or was so popular, I think, genre fiction is dominated by story. And I think that when you're talking about kids and kids reading, kids read for story. They don't have a lot of patience for a lot of dense narrative and character development. I mean, they want something to happen and you can see if you read the Harry Potter series, the first book it's all one event after another. I mean, you could see why eight year olds loved that book, because it doesn't stop to describe anything. It's just Harry's under... he's in his hidey hole and then the owl comes, and he gets rescued. And then he goes to you know, has the sorting hat and all of those things.
Nancy Pearl:
And with each succeeding book, as the kids got older, it's more complex and more until the last two are very, very slow moving compared to the first. So, I think that that kind of genre reading makes a whole lot of sense and it's still many people even never outgrow that and why should they? If that's what you're looking for is a good story, the chances are you're going to find it more often than not in a genre novel.
Emily Calkins:
So, going back to that point you were making about Watership Down and Madeline Miller making you want to reread, I'm wondering if there were any other, if any of the interviews inspired you to pick up things and reread them that you hadn't read in a long time?
Nancy Pearl:
Yes. So, because we are at these writers' houses, we could see and many of the writers, TC Boyle, Tom Boyle, for example. We walked around his... he has bookshelves all over his house. He lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style, the first prairie style home west of the Mississippi. [inaudible 00:12:48] T.C. Boyle lives in Montecito, California, outside of Santa Barbara. But we could look at the books on his bookshelves and there's something so wonderful about a writer that you admire, as I admire T.C. Boyle, Tom Boyle, and seeing books that you loved on his bookshelf.
Nancy Pearl:
And so, one of the books, a novel that I loved, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize several years ago, that I haven't met very many people who have read is called The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, by Bob Shacochis and there it was on Tom Boyle's bookshelf. And I said, "Oh, my God, I love that book." And he said, "Oh, I love it, too." So, now I feel like I want to go back and reread it, but it's a very powerful... it's a big book, and there's not a lot of happiness in it. And therefore, so I am not recommending it to anybody at this time, I think at least wait till spring. But it's a wonderful, wonderful novel. And then John Updike, the Maples Stories, which is kind of a lesser known John Updike.
Nancy Pearl:
So that kind of thing was just so interesting. A book that I did go back and a book that I had never read just read a lot about, after we interviewed Laila Lalami, who is a Moroccan American writer and she talked a lot about Edward Said's masterpiece, Orientalism and talked about what it was like to grow up for her, to grow up in Morocco, a child of colonialism because the French were still ruling Morocco, still owned Morocco while she was growing up. And so, reading that I found really, really interesting and it just sort of changes or Edward Said's book changes the way you look at or think about colonial societies and what it means to live in one and what it means to be somebody in a country who has colonies. So that was really, really interesting to me.
Nancy Pearl:
But one of the things, Emily, that each of the interviews, each of the 22 interviews is really different from every other one, and I think that's because we didn't go into these interviews with a list of questions. We went in what we usually began with me asking that question that you started with, but then we let the interview go wherever the writer wanted to take it. And it was pretty amazing to get to know these writers in a different way than most interviews have you learned about them because we're not talking about them as writers, we're talking about them as readers. And that's a whole different view of them. I think of more, I guess I would say, a more realistic view or a more personal view in a way. So yes, [inaudible 00:16:27].
Emily Calkins:
Were any that really surprised you? I mean, somebody who you thought, "This person, they just pulled this book out of left field, and I never would have guessed that this was a favorite for this writer?"
Nancy Pearl:
Yes. Yes. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the other person who loved The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, So, I mean, and also Charles Johnson, and Jonathan Lethem, who are very different writers. They're not the same age. They grew up in very different circumstances. Of course, Charles Johnson is African American, Jonathan Lethem is not, but they both talked about how important Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick was to them. And that was just so amazing. Ayelet Waldman, Michael Chabon's wife talking about how much she loved The Happy Hollisters, which - do you know that series?
Emily Calkins:
Mm-mm (negative).
Nancy Pearl:
Okay. It was way earlier, but it was one of those like the Bobbsey Twins. It was written by many different people and it was one of those series that probably wasn't as popular as the Bobbsey Twins, but there are many Happy Hollisters fans out there. And I know when they see that Ayelet Waldman loved that book, they're going to, "Yes."
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, that sort of moment that little spark of recognition like you had with T.C. Boyle. I think there's a point in the book where you're talking with somebody and you mentioned that you loved Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence and that your favorite is Over Sea, Under Stone. And I put like a big red exclamation point like that's my favorite as well. That is when you see that connection, it's a new way of connecting with the person.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah. And I think it's, I mean, I don't have a lot of small talk. I'm not good at parties or anything, because all I can ever think to talk about is books, but when you find somebody who loves a book that you love, you immediately feel like, "My gosh, we're friends." Whether we're ever going to see each other in-person or not, we have that connection, so yeah.
Emily Calkins:
The other one, I don't think it's mentioned in the book, but I've like heard through the librarian grapevine that you love is Code Name Verity. Is that true? Code Name Verity?
Nancy Pearl:
No, that's totally true. And it's a wonderful audio book.
Emily Calkins:
Yes.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. So, just if you haven't read Code Name Verity, everyone, it's a World War II story that is absolutely fantastic and a librarian favorite, I think, not just Nancy and I, but lots of librarians.
Nancy Pearl:
Right. And it's a sort of book that you get to the end and then you realize that you need to start all over again, because you want to see how the author worked it out. Elizabeth Wein, I think her name is, how she worked it out to get to that place. It's a really wonderful book.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, it's called Code Name Verity, like the word for truth, verity. Yeah. Let's see. So, one of the interviews I love, well, I mean, they're all great and like you said, they're so different. But in Jonathan Lethem's interview, he talks about secret genres which is this idea that there are these categories or sort of these subcategories that don't have any marketing, no, like, special section in the library, but it has all of these rules, these sort of unspoken formal rules. Do you have any favorite secret genres?
Nancy Pearl:
I don't. That's not how I would think about it. I mean, I think that my favorite books are just character-driven novels that are really well written and that's not exactly a secret genre. But I wonder if you could consider books written in the second person, like Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.
Emily Calkins:
Sure.
Nancy Pearl:
If that could be a genre or what's his name, the Virgin Suicides?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. Jeffrey Eugenides.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, Jeffrey Eugenides, right, right.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, that's an interesting idea.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
I was just so sort of taken with this because I think the way that we sort of categorize books and I really like romance and romance is very... not only has tons of sub genres, but has all of these sort of rules about it. And that's what I like about it, right? We were talking before about how comforting it is to read something where you kind of know where you're going.
Nancy Pearl:
Right, yes, especially at this time in our country's life, where we have no idea where we're going. Which is why, I mean, my favorite romance writer, I'm not a big romance reader, but I love, I adore Georgette Heyer. And I love those books because you know from the moment that heroine meets this guy and says that he's the most odious person she's ever met, you know by the end of the book that they're going to get together and that's very comforting.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, and we were talking a little bit before - what other comforting things have you been reading?
Nancy Pearl:
I've been reading a lot of books published by this publishing company called Dean Street Press. And they have a section, what they do, what they're doing is reprinting books by little known or underappreciated writers that were published from the 1920s to the 1960s. And it's not that they're - I think of them as light reading, but, that does cover the end of World War I and you're going through World War II and World War II is a big subject for many of these writers. But I still find them very comforting in the sense that World War I was awful, World War II was awful. The Blitz, going through that was terrible and it changed the world forever, both those wars, but now we're done with that.
Nancy Pearl:
I mean, it's not so present, the way everything now is so in your face, and so present. So, I'm finding those books very, very, very, very comforting. There's a book called The Women in Black, which doesn't sound particularly comforting, but it's a wonderful Australian novel set in the 1950s at a Sydney department store, a department store in Sydney, and it's about the women who work in the dress department. And it's almost the closest thing to Barbara Pym, somebody else who I very much... some of her books, I very, very much love. There's a writer named Elizabeth Fair.
Nancy Pearl:
I mean, the nice thing is these books, they brought them back in print and what I'm finding is I don't want to read anything that's upsetting. I just want, I don't know. I don't even know how to describe what I want. And we couldn't have done The Writer's Library this year. I mean, everything was done by December of 2019 and thank goodness, because otherwise it would all have to be over Zoom.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, which is not quite the same.
Nancy Pearl:
No, no.
Emily Calkins:
There's the book, I was thinking about those Dean Street Press books, there's a book from, I think it's from the '50s called The Dud Avocado?
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Remember The Dud Avocado?
Nancy Pearl:
Yep.
Emily Calkins:
And I feel like it falls into that sort of, it's sort of like, it's like a madcap comedy, sort of where she like goes off with this guy and she gets herself into all this trouble, but it's very light and funny [crosstalk 00:25:05] that seems like.
Emily Calkins:
The other thing that I'm thinking of, a sort of a comfort read, which I haven't actually gone back to, but now I'm itching to go over to my shelf and pull it off is M.F.K. Fisher. It kind of has that energy that sort of like madcap, but also that time period. Like you said, it's like over and then it has this arc, and there's a sense that it's finished and it's kind of old fashioned.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, and these books are very old fashioned, but I just love them. And I have to say for eBook readers, most of those Dean Street Press books are $2.99 or $3.99 and I'm somebody who, "I mean, that's what the library is for." I support my library, but if you can't get the books at the library, then they're very inexpensive and great fun. Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Speaking about your e-reader, are you an e-reader person or do you prefer print?
Nancy Pearl:
I am an e-reader person, but I have to say, I really prefer to read paper, to read a real book, even though I know it's a real book, but I really like e-readers, because I can read in the middle of the night without turning on the light. And I have to say all those Dean Street Books are perfect for the middle of the night reading.
Emily Calkins:
Yes. Yeah. They sound like middle of the night reading.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, yeah, right. Sort of like a cup of hot milk. [crosstalk 00:26:39].
Emily Calkins:
So, in the book, you talk a lot, you talk to these writers about what mattered to them, books that mattered to them as readers. And I'm wondering if you, as a writer, have books that are important to you as a writer that are different from the books that are important to you as a reader.
Nancy Pearl:
So, I have to preface that by saying, I really don't consider myself a writer. I mean, the only thing I feel like I've really written is my novel and that I can say I'm a writer, because I did this novel. But all the other books, which I'm very proud of, are just books about, not just, they're books about books. And so, they're not creative in the same way that writing a novel is.
Nancy Pearl:
But one of the things that writing the novel, one of the unfortunate repercussions of writing George and Lizzie is that I have this tendency now when I'm reading a book, to sort of see the scaffolding behind it, to see and I'll get to a point in a book and I'll say, "That's why that happened on page seven. This had to happen here." And for me, who just sort of loves to kind of fall into a book and not think, just be there in the book, that's a kind of uncomfortable feeling. Some of them love it, but so many of these writers used reading as a means to make them better writers, and not just... I mean, Laurie, Laurie Frankel, for example.
Nancy Pearl:
Basically, Laurie is always working on a novel, so she's working all the time on either rewriting and doing, editing her novel that she's finished or she's writing a new novel, and she chooses what to read, based on what will help her with the book that she's writing. So now, she's working on her new book, which is going to come out next year is told from the point of view of three girls, triplets, and it's told from each one of them in turn, it's called One, Two, Three. And so, when we interviewed her, she was reading all of these books that are told from multiple viewpoints.
Nancy Pearl:
And somebody else did the same. Andrew Sean Greer, who wrote the book Less, which won the Pulitzer in 2017. He said if he starts reading a book that is not going to help him learn to be a better writer, he just stops reading it. And even, Laurie is, I think the youngest person that we interviewed. I think the youngest writer that we interviewed in the book and Russell Banks is the oldest person that we interviewed in the book.
Nancy Pearl:
And Russell said that that's how he read, too. He read to become a better writer. And he said in this new book that he's finished or is working on, I guess, he reread the Death of Ivan Ilyich, the wonderful Tolstoy novella because there was something in that, that he felt would help him write this section that he was working on, that Tolstoy had done something that really reverberated for him, and that he needed to learn how Tolstoy did it. That's really, so like, I read as a reader, not a writer.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I thought it was so interesting because on one hand, you have Laurie, who is saying, "I read," I think also in that interview, she talks about how she was trying to read more first person, which she doesn't normally for whatever reason read. And then you have other people, and I'm not sure. I'm trying to think who said this, but a couple of people who said, I think Susan Choi very specifically says, "When I'm writing a novel, I don't read fiction at all." So, it's sort of this interesting mix of people who either are really looking to sort of build on what they're reading, or are trying to keep other people's voices kind of out of their [crosstalk 00:31:23] - from creeping into their own writing.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah. And I think if you're somebody who reads for voice or if voice is really important to you as it is to me, I can see why you wouldn't want to read books in which that voice might kind of sneak its way into your head. I mean, when I was writing George and Lizzie, it didn't matter to me what I read, because the voice of the narrator in George and Lizzie was so clear to me that nothing was going to sneak its way in. And that was really pretty, pretty straightforward.
Emily Calkins:
So, you mentioned at the beginning that you co-wrote this book or you did all these interviews with your friend, what is it like working in a team instead of the generally solo exercise of writing?
Nancy Pearl:
Right. What a good question. I think the whole book was Jeff's idea. We met because he was doing a project for the Washington State Jewish Historical Society and they were doing a project honoring 20 Jewish women in Washington State and I was one of the people that they wanted to honor, which was an honor. And Jeff interviewed all of the honorees separately and when he interviewed me, it became really clear that we both loved talking about books and we loved enough of the same books that there was that connection, and then it would be fun to argue about books that you don't love. So, we started kind of hanging out. I feel like he's like a little brother.
Nancy Pearl:
And one day, he said, "I have this idea for a book called The Writer's Library. What if we went around and took pictures of writer's physical libraries, and did a little bit of an interview with them, and it would be just this beautiful coffee table book." And I said, "Well, I'm not a coffee table book kind of person." It really didn't interest me, but the idea of interviewing writers I think would be really fun about the books that are in their libraries, whether their libraries are physical or whether their libraries that are in their heads, which is, I think, an interesting question, too.
Nancy Pearl:
So, all props to Jeff, because this was his idea. And by and large, it was a very good experience. There were a couple of difficult times. One, when we had to decide who we were going to interview and so, we each made a list of the authors that we both wanted to interview and the ones that were on both lists those were very easy, and we could start the process of asking those writers if they would be in the book, and the rest, the negotiations, it didn't come to fisticuffs, I can say that, and voices were not raised, but there were some really, I mean, I do remember saying when Jeff suggested somebody, I do remember saying, "No, just no. No."
Nancy Pearl:
And then the book is - we deliberately... it's all American writers, but we wanted to do a wide range of writers, so it's America, it's the melting pot America. Laila Lalami who came to the United States as an adult from Morocco. One of the most interesting interviews I think in the book is with Luis Urrea, who really grew up straddling the Mexican American border. He was born in Tijuana, his father was Mexican, his mother was American, and really, their marriage, his parents' marriage as he explained to us, was really, they really fought over whether Luis was going to be Mexican or American and one of the ways that played out was in the books that his mother picked for him, which were all by American writers and the books that his father picked for him, which were by Mexican writers.
Nancy Pearl:
And I have to say the story that Luis told us about Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or not Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer is just a wonderful, wonderful, very funny story that I still smile about every time I think about Luis. His mother reading him Tom Sawyer and Luis's reaction.
Emily Calkins:
Can you tell us who someone that you really wanted to get in the book, who wasn't available or-
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, definitely. So, we really wanted to interview Tobias Wolff. This Boy's Life is probably his best known one, but also, he's a wonderful short story writer and Jeff and I both admired him. Well, he was working on a new book and he said, when he got done with that, he'd be happy to be interviewed, but by that time, the manuscript was done and we have to turn it in. We really wanted to interview Toni Morrison, but she was very ill, of course, and then died. Sadly, we lost...that would have been so amazing. And we really wanted to interview Alice Monroe because we, Jeff and I, both admire her so greatly, but she's kind of retired from writing. She's in her 80s and wasn't doing any interviews.
Nancy Pearl:
And we really wanted to interview Lorrie Moore. We so much wanted to interview Lorrie Moore, but Lorrie Moore wasn't doing or didn't do in-person interviews, she just did email interviews. And Jeff and I, at that time, really felt that it was important to do these all in-person, and then we couldn't ever find ourselves in the same city that Donna Tartt was in, and we both wanted Donna Tartt. We really wanted her childhood reading and all of that, so we decided to do Donna Tartt's by email. And now we're just both kicking ourselves that we were so stubborn and didn't do it with Lorrie Moore.
Nancy Pearl:
So those, there were lots of authors. There's so many more authors that I wish we could do an interview, you know, we could have interviewed and people have been saying, "Do you think you'll do a follow-up?" And I don't want to do a follow-up by Zoom. I feel really strongly about that, that it wouldn't be the same as being in their homes. The authors were wonderful. I mean, they were so generous with their time. They were so generous in having us come to their houses and see where they wrote and it was a pretty great experience.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, there's a real warmth to the book and I think that that experience that you're talking about really comes through. I am not much of a nonfiction reader, and I just found it so, it's just like being in a room with someone and like you said, like there's nothing better than talking about books, so what a-
Nancy Pearl:
That's great.
Emily Calkins:
And I feel like really, you can see that, you can feel that in the book, this sort of this joy and enthusiasm around reading. So, I hope that you'll have an opportunity to do it in-person someday.
Nancy Pearl:
I hope so, too. It would be so great.
Emily Calkins:
So, let's-
Nancy Pearl:
I was just going to say that many of these writers I think are not particularly well-known and I've gotten an email from a cousin of mine who said she's so embarrassed she only really ever heard of seven of the writers of the 22 writers, and she considered herself a reader. But I think that was the point of the book in a way that we really wanted to introduce writers who might not be as well-known. I mean, Jonathan Lethem, yes, Dave Eggers, yes, but how many people have read Vendela Vida, who happens to be Dave Eggers' wife and has a new book coming out and is a wonderful, wonderful writer. So, part of it was we wanted people to read this book and have their to-be-read list just explode. And so at the end of each interview, we pulled out about 10 titles from the interview that the authors were particularly excited about.
Emily Calkins:
Yes, well, that's certainly happened to me. I was like, "No, too many books, too little time." And now, so many more. But even some of the writers who I heard of, but not necessarily read, hearing from them made me curious about their work in some way, so there's certainly a bunch more that I'm going to look into.
Emily Calkins:
But I think we'll go to audience questions now. And there's just one for now, so if you have questions, don't hesitate to put them in the question, that little "ask a question" feature down at the bottom there. And this is a question from Marian Webb. It says, "Nancy, do you know Furrowed Middlebrow's choices?"
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, do I? Those are my favorite books from Dean Street Press are the Furrowed Middlebrow. I mean, I just think it's such a fabulous name for a collection of books and I guess I realized that that's what I've been reading my whole life. But I mean, that whole idea of reprinting books from that period, the 20s to the 60s, it really inspired me. On Twitter and on Facebook, every day, I post a backlist title of the day, a book from, well, it could be from any time period, but just an older title that I really wish more people would read.
Nancy Pearl:
And I think that's one of the things that we kind of make a mistake in because any book that you haven't read is a new book, so just because a book came out this month, doesn't make it any better than. I mean, I just think about the books that were published in the '60s, Reynolds Price's books or just people, just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful novels. And so, I've been doing that. That really gives me a purpose to get up in the morning is to pick by backlist book of the day.
Emily Calkins:
How do you decide which one you're going to do?
Nancy Pearl:
It's just, I look at my bookshelves and I think, "This would be a good one," or I look at the first book that I wrote for Libraries Unlimited was called Now Read This, and it's books published between 1978 and 1998, so I go through there and I say, "That was a wonderful novel," that kind of thing.
Emily Calkins:
I am curious how you keep track of what you read? Like do you have the world's longest Goodreads list?
Nancy Pearl:
No, I don't. Do you? Do you [crosstalk 00:43:43]?
Emily Calkins:
I do. I do Goodreads. I started when I was like fresh out of library school, so it's getting pretty long, but it's not-
Nancy Pearl:
Wow, yeah. Mostly, what I do, I have a terrible memory for most things, but I do remember books and I usually can put a book together with an author by picturing it on a library shelf, very, very strangely, so I have that. I mean, I can remember books that way and then I do, and then I have all the Book Lust books, which are basically the books that I've read. And then I do a lot of book talks in libraries and literacy organizations.
Nancy Pearl:
And so I have a record of what I talked about each year and some of those go back like 20 years, but I could sometimes go back and look and say, "I talked about this in 1980," and I think I don't even remember that book." It's like, "Really?" But mostly I can still... if I like a book enough to talk about it, then it sort of becomes part of me. That's how I feel about it.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that's the Susan Orlean's introduction, right?
Nancy Pearl:
Right.
Emily Calkins:
It's the library's not necessarily your physical library, but it's the library that's with you all the time.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah. And we wanted to interview, we wanted to include Susan Orlean and interview her for the book itself, but we could never be in the same city. When we were on the East Coast, she was on the West Coast and vice versa. And so, finally, we had to just turn in the manuscript and we just had the idea of asking her to do a foreword, and she was gracious enough to agree to do it. And it's lovely.
Emily Calkins:
It is, yeah. It's a lovely forward.
Nancy Pearl:
Totally.
Emily Calkins:
So, let's see. There's lots of chatter in the chat about audiobooks and we were talking before the event started that you're a big audio book listener. Do you have favorite narrators?
Nancy Pearl:
Almost any British narrator. Juliet Stevenson, I think is just wonderful. I had a wonderful time listening to Mrs. Gaskell's books North and South, and Wives and Daughters, but really any British narrator will do it for me.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. It's just something about that.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah.
Emily Calkins:
Fancy accent.
Nancy Pearl:
Right, right.
Emily Calkins:
Let's see. So, Sheryl wants to know, when you interviewed Dave Eggers and his wife, did they have separate bookshelves?
Nancy Pearl:
So, we were supposed to interview... we had a few married couples in mind that we wanted to interview together as we did Michael and Ayelet and we were all set to interview Dave and Vendela together, but then there was an illness in the family and so, we had to do them separately in separate trips to Northern California. So, I don't know if they have separate bookshelves.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, but let me just say that Dave Eggers is... Jeff and I left the interview with Dave Eggers thinking that we needed to call him St. Dave. I mean, he is the most generous... the number of nonprofits that he has set up devoted to helping kids in need is absolutely amazing and he does such good, good, good, good work. I just think I always liked him from afar, but meeting him and I had not met him before this, and meeting him and just seeing what he's done for reading and for writing, it was pretty amazing.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, he's fantastic. Related to that, were there challenges when you interviewed Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman together? Was it harder to interview a couple than it was to interview individuals?
Nancy Pearl:
Funnily enough, it wasn't harder. Jeff and I were very conscious of the fact that of the two, Michael is clearly the better known writer. But Ayelet wrote a series of mysteries, the Mommy-Track Mysteries, which are great fun, and then some other novels and some nonfiction books. So, we were aware that we wanted Ayelet to feel as included in the interview. But what you get in that interview, I think, is not only a sense of what they read, but you really get a lovely picture of their marriage and what you see is that it's a very loving relationship.
Nancy Pearl:
And one of the most touching things is, is that we asked each of them if there was a book that they wish that they had written, and Ayelet said, "If I could have written Kavalier & Clay, I could die happy," which was, of course, Michael's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. And in all seriousness, she said that and I thought that was really, just really, really lovely.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I agree. I think that interview is one of my favorites, because you just can... it's just like a little window into their life with each other and how they think about reading and writing together, and I really liked that one.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah. Good, good.
Emily Calkins:
Let's see. So, Devin wants to know, how do you prioritize what you read? What's your triage process for your to-read file?
Nancy Pearl:
How do I prioritize? Well, because I don't read any books that I'm not enjoying, I stop immediately if I'm... let's see, I have to start. How do I prioritize? I guess it's just as unregulated as that I finish a book and whatever book pops into my mind is the book that I'll read next, so I don't have a list that I'm going to read and check off.
Emily Calkins:
Just whatever.
Nancy Pearl:
Just whatever.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, not a good answer. Sorry, Devin.
Emily Calkins:
No. And then Becky says, "You have a bookshelf behind you. What kind of books do you collect?"
Nancy Pearl:
So, these, I am not a collector of books, Jeff is a collector of books. These are all... basically, these are review copies that publishers send me that they want me to read and review them, talk about them on Morning Edition. So, these... and then I have all my jigsaw, well, some of my jigsaw puzzles that I've been doing during the pandemic. So, these are not... I don't consider these my books. They're just here today, gone tomorrow, basically. But the books that I do keep are books that have meant a lot to me, so I have a lot of old children's books, but because I'm not a collector, I don't care what condition they're in and mostly they're in terrible condition because I found them at a library book sales and things like that.
Nancy Pearl:
So, all of my favorite writers, I'm never going to read these books again, but I have all of the Betty Cavanna books, which were books for teens when I was that age. I have all the Mary Stoltz books, who was a writer that I really admired, who's just was a wonderful, very different writer for teens. Her books are great. And I have my favorite children's books. And then with the adult books, it's mostly just books that I know that I'll go back to and reread and a lot of really silly, a lot of wonderful comfort reads. Elizabeth Cadell, for example. D.E. Stevenson, I mean, they're just books that you kind of pick up at bad times and they get you through those times.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. Let's see. We've got a few more. This is... let's see. Did you have any moments or experiences of serendipity when you were working on The Writer's Library?
Nancy Pearl:
I would say, probably no, not that kind of aha moment. I guess, one of the people that we interviewed was Richard Ford, who is from Jackson, Mississippi and knew Eudora Welty and that was the kind of, his stories about Eudora Welty were kind of wonderful moments because, well, I love her. I loved her books and I thought she was amazing. So, but that kind of serendipity? No. I have to say if you're going to Vermont and you're driving trying to find Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and it's a rainy day or whatever, your GPS no matter what the map thing you use is not going to work. That was like, we went round and round and round in circles, so-
Emily Calkins:
We will remember if we're trying to get to Breadloaf. Yeah.
Nancy Pearl:
Yeah, paper map indeed. Exactly. Right.
Emily Calkins:
Okay, and I think this is a good one to wrap up on, which is, "What are you working on now?"
Nancy Pearl:
Really, there's a character in George and Lizzie that I sometimes think I would like to write more about and it's Maverick who was Lizzie's boyfriend in high school, and now he's in his 50s and he's failed. He feels like he's never done anything right in his life and he lives in Seattle in 2020. So, I'm feeling like I can have a lot of fun. Well, 2000 before the pandemic, 2018, so I feel like I could have a lot of fun with talking about his life in Seattle, and what it's like to feel you're a failure at the age of 50. And then this is the best part, then he learns that he has a child that he never knew, and so there's all of that. So, this is all like going around in my head, but writing a novel is really hard and it takes a lot of stick-to-itiveness and I'm not sure I have that, that still, but I don't know. [crosstalk 00:56:10].
Emily Calkins:
Well, thank you so much for being here. This was a wonderful conversation.
Nancy Pearl:
Well, Emily, thank you. This has just been absolutely, just terrific. Thank you so much.
Emily Calkins:
Our pleasure.
