What It’s Like to Write a Book Full of Books

TD: One thing I noticed is that as you write about different categories, you find kind of the right tone for what you’re talking about. As a critic you can’t subject all kinds of books to a single standard.

JM: Well, thank you. Yes.

TD: And in the case of this book, you don’t write about children’s books in the same terms that you write about Milton or Shakespeare. The same goes with, say, a work of military history, or a detective novel. But yet each category does have intrinsic standards, right?

JM: Each category has its own standards, which are determined by what the category delivers to the reader: entertainment, erudition, escape. Sometimes even exasperation!

Again, to go back to the food analogy, there are qualities that make a really good hamburger which different from those that make a good gazpacho. Different kinds of flavors and techniques and so on. When one looks at those foods on a plate, one approaches them with a different appetite. What I tried to do in the book was approach each author, and each book and each subject, with the appetite that was most apt.

TD: And I must say, your “food-centricity” comes through in the book as well—

JM: Yes. There’s the writing of M.F.K. Fischer, the great American writer about food, a lot of her work about her time in France. Roy Andres DeGroot has an enchanting book called The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, that starts when he is looking at a bottle of chartreuse, the liqueur, after dinner in New York, and reads on the label something about the monks who make it. So he becomes interested in that and travels to the Alpine where Chartreuse is made, and composes a rich narrative about his trip.

What is telling to me about the best food writing is that it’s so human, because in its essence it about people around the table talking to each other. Again, the word “appetite” is important, and “taste.” I guess that’s why there’s a good deal about food—and wine. Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route—his story of becoming a wine importer, and finding artisanal wines in France, decades ago, before such wines became de rigueur. These are all stories of people developing a sense of discernment and taste in specific places.

TD: It reminds me of a book I’d never heard of—until I read your book—about a piano shop in Paris, which I think in some ways defies category.  

JM: That is a wonderful book: The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. It’s by a man named Thad Carhart, who I found out, in researching the book, was, if I’m remembering correctly, an early Apple executive, who found enough economic stability through that to relocate to Paris.  I’m not exactly sure what the sequence is—he might have been in Paris for Apple. In any case, the book is about living in a Parisian neighborhood, where, every day, he walks past a shop with these parts of a piano in its window. He’s not sure at first exactly what the shop does, but it leads him to think “Now that I have some leisure, I’d like to go back to playing the piano”—which he had done as a young man. So he goes into the shop to see if he can buy a piano there, and gets entangled in the etiquette of Parisian society and commerce. He couldn’t just walk into the shop and buy a piano, he eventually discovers, he had to be recommended to the piano dealer by someone in dealer’s circle.  The book is filled with characters, and Parisian, and with lots of lore about pianos, but it’s in the service of, again, a very human story. It’s a marvelous story.

TD: It really is. And when it opens up literally to the backroom, that he doesn’t even realize exists, until he finally is allowed back there, it’s like this whole world of magic. It’s just amazing.

JM: Yes, exactly.

“Each category has its own standards, which are determined by what the category delivers to the reader: entertainment, erudition, escape. Sometimes even exasperation!”

TD: You’ve had help from your wife on this book I believe.

JM: Yes, my wife, Margot Greenbaum Mustich, has been working with me every step of the way.

She built a database for all of the information about the authors mentioned, even those who don’t have a book in the book, all of the ancillary books that are recommended, researching the dates and other data, making it accessible to us for indexing and other purposes. And she is a superb—gentle but determined—copy editor. Perfect for an often cranky writer.

TD: Unlike other books in the series,  this one has a beautiful design layout.

JM: I’m glad you mentioned that. The book’s superbly gifted designer, Janet Vicario, brought a great deal of art, attention, and decisiveness to the task. And the illustrations that she and her team chose to go with the book—not just book covers and author photos, but many other types of illustration—are wonderfully chosen, and they considerably enhance the experience. The book is in full color, too. The whole Workman team, from production editing to typesetting to manufacturing, has done a terrific job. I’m grateful to them all.

TD: The subtitle, A Life-Changing list, while I’m sure you can’t guarantee that, I think it’s partly just to make it clear to people, that this is slightly different from the other books in the series in that it’s not supposed to be definitive. It’s not supposed to be, as we said earlier, a great books list. It’s a book of recommendations. I mean I shouldn’t minimize it that way, but it’s a book of recommendations, to be explored in so many different ways.

We talked about some of the great authors in there. I’ve always thought that a great possible book in itself was “How to Read the Great Authors.” And this is that in a way. Because when you include an essay about, let’s say, Joseph Conrad, and it’s more than the average 500-600 words, you look at the whole career, you recommend where to begin, what to do next, and that reflects a certain scholarly aspect.

JM: Thank you for saying that. What I tried to do, especially with those authors whom readers might assume they know about, or assume they’re not interested in, or whose work they’ve always been daunted by, is to give an invitation to their books that is engaging but still robust enough give a sense of the landscapes they create. To suggest that this is what you’ll be thinking about if you read this author. For most of us, too much of our reading of serious literature is when we’re very young, and they’re school assignments. And we approach books a certain way because of that—like they’re homework.

TD: Right. Like they’re an obligation.

JM: Yeah! And books can be so much richer in just informing your life. I like to go deep into an author.

In the past couple years I’ve read a lot of Henry James, and this year a lot of Virginia Woolf. A friend of mine asked, “Well, what books did you like best? What would you recommend I read?” She wanted to know about the individual books, but I came to a different way of thinking about it. Reading, you know, a pile of Henry James novels, that was like a trip to a foreign country. It wasn’t like reading this book and then that—it was more like living in Italy for six months: I came back looking at the world differently. Same thing, for sure, with Virginia Woolf. So it’s not just about you’ve checked off this book, but your eyes and your mind have been opened to different things. That’s why the great books are great, and why they’ve endured. As long as you’re open enough not to worry about what you’re not getting, you can focus on absorbing whatever you can get. It’s like you can go to—to use the same analogy—you can go live in Italy for six months, and follow a guidebook around and see all the highlights that you’re supposed to see, and collect all the postcards, or these days selfies at all the sights; or you could sit in a café, talk to people, look around, see how they eat, how they process life a little differently. That’s how books enhance our lives, informing our attention to what’s coming next, or how we reflect upon the past.

TD: Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Joseph Conrad, in fact, trying to read all of Joseph Conrad, I was kind of startled that you recommended his A Personal Record as the starting point (although you also write about Heart of Darkness). And it wasn’t until later that I realized that you’d actually picked the perfect way to begin with Conrad. Because first of all, everybody’s been required to read Heart of Darkness, or Lord Jim. And my favorite Conrad, Nostromo, is way too hard to begin with.    

JM: Yes.

TD: So you picked one of his non-fiction books that’s thoroughly engaging. Somebody that’s never read a word or Conrad—or was forced to read Heart of Darkness or The Secret Sharer in high school—would be kind of startled, because it gives a sense of what Conrad was partly about. I’ve never forgotten the story about his uncle who ate a dog.

JM: Yes. This is a book which I hope people will keep on their shelves and pull off when they want to read Conrad, or they want to read Virginia Woolf, or they’re looking for a good mystery. It’s meant to be used as a resource. It’s also very much designed as a tool for booksellers and librarians, to help them take books out of the stacks and bring them forward.

TD: As library expenses rise, and book buying decreases, librarians need more guidance.

JM: Well, librarians are pretty smart! And they also have their own points of view, and I’d love to have them use my book to broadcast those: “Here’s the ten books our librarians think you should read before you die. None of them are in Jim’s book.” One of the things that’s been fun—I was lucky enough to be invited down to the American Library Association convention in June—is speaking with librarians about the books they’re passionate about: “Is this book in your book? That book? What about this one?  Why not?” I hope my book starts lots of conversations like that.

“For most of us, too much of our reading of serious literature is when we’re very young, and they’re school assignments. And we approach books a certain way because of that—like they’re homework.”

TD: We talked about a question in the beginning that you’ve been asked a lot already, and I’m going to begin to round this up by asking you a question that I think you might be asked a lot about in the future. I know you’re going to be doing a round of interviews and book appearances all over the country. Why should someone prefer this book to the Internet, Googling Joseph Conrad, say.

JM: And I think it’s more rewarding to read because of the nature of the context it provides. If you’re just looking for Conrad’s dates, and a list of his major works, of course you can get that from the Internet. But there is a sensibility that runs through my book that I hope readers will find congenial, and come to trust. I don’t mean trust as in “agree with,” but respect and react to in considered ways.

I expect people are going to pick up this book and go immediately in search of the authors they love, like you with Conrad. Or somebody’s going to say, “My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice, I wonder if it’s in there. What does he have to say about that?” And when they find it, they’re going to say, “Oh, OK, he seems to know what he’s talking about.” (At least I hope so!) And that may lead them to look at other books they don’t already know. “Curation” is a much overused word now, but I think that’s part of the value the book can provide.

TD: I think that’s what I was looking for when I asked the question is that the Internet, aside from being a cesspool of information, we need guidance. I mean it’s been clear that the state of criticism, which I once desultorily practiced, is in disarray. No one knows who to trust.

JM: It’s about the fact that reading, and the kind of interior life it presupposes, is really important to one’s mental health, and I would also venture to say. . .

TD: To one’s moral health.

JM: . . . to one’s moral health and to the mental and moral health of society at large. And that when you pick up a book you are also acknowledging others, because you’re reading someone else’s words, and you’re learning about new worlds. That dialogue that books encourage is critically important. So, it’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, but the important part to me is not the 1,000, but the “read before you die.” It may not be these thousand books. I hope it’ll be a good number of them, and that you’ll discover many new ones, but it’s not meant to be homework. To round it off with another food analogy, reading is how we can feed the hungers that the rest of our lives can make hard to define, much less satisfy.

TD: Right.

JM: It’s nourishing—essential to growth.

TD: My last question is this: this book doesn’t go into the world, and just exist on its own. You’re going to have a lot going on with this book, I imagine, in terms of responding to people on your book tour, in terms of your website—I assume you’re going to invite comments.

JM: Yes.

TD: So really it’s part of an ongoing dialogue you hope to have with your readers.

JM: Absolutely. With my readers and among readers. And librarians and booksellers. I think books have receded from the frontlines of the cultural conversation in a way that’s not healthy for the culture. You mentioned that criticism has become omnipresent and to some degree meaningless on the Internet. But, I believe it’s also true that serious criticism often gets between readers and the best books, by speaking abstrusely and not talking about how reading can enrich peoples’ lives.