http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/review/junot-diaz-by-the-book.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
The article is all about his reading habits, which as you might imagine range all over the place, and all over the world.
Durham will be the center of Junot Diaz's world on Thursday, September 20th, when he reads from his new book, This is How You Lose Her, at Motorco Music Hall, 723 Rigsbee Avenue, starting at 7:30. Tickets are $5.00, available now at The Regulator, or at the door until we fill the place. The tickets may be used as a $5.00 credit for any Junot Diaz book, or as a store credit.
Don't pass up this opportunity to hear one of the best and most engaging writers of our time!
A few things from the Times article that especially caught my eye:
What’s the last truly great book you read?
Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”
A book of extraordinary intelligence, humanity and (formalistic)
cunning. Boo’s four years reporting on a single Mumbai slum, following a
small group of garbage recyclers, have produced something beyond
groundbreaking. She humanizes with all the force of literature the
impossible lives of the people at bottom of our pharaonic global order,
and details with a journalist’s unsparing exactitude the absolute
suffering that undergirds India’s economic boom. The language is
extraordinary, the portraits indelible, and then there are those lines
at the end that just about freeze your heart: “The gates of the rich,
occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on
the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s
great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.”
What were your most cherished books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?
I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid. Donald Sobol passed recently, and
that really brought it all back to me, how important his books were to
my little self. I didn’t learn to read until I was 7, so I missed out on
the early stuff, jumped right to chapter books, right to Encyclopedia
Brown. What I loved about Boy Detective Leroy Brown was that (1) he was
unabashedly smart (smart was not cool when and where I grew up) and (2)
his best friend was a girl, tough Sally Kimball, who was both Leroy’s
bodyguard and his intellectual equal. Sobol did more to flip gender
scripts in my head than almost anybody in my early years.
Who are the best short story writers?
People who like to suffer or perhaps people tempted by perfectibility.
For that is the short story’s great lure — that you can write a perfect
one. With novels it’s quite the opposite — the lure of the novel is that
you can never write a perfect one.
You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?
This is a question that always kills me. For a book lover this type of
triage is never a record of what was brought along but a record of what
was left behind. But if forced to choose by, say, a shipwreck or an evil
Times editor...
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