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

James Mustich debuts this month with a book that reflects a lifetime among books.   A Thousand Books To Read Before You Die, which arrive in bookstores this week, is no simple listicle; Mustich  walks a fine line between literary critic and enthusiast, “a common reader” in other words.  Which was the name of the book catalogue business that he ran back before the internet took off.

Jim has worked in and around books for all his adult life: in bookstores, as a publisher; and as editor of The Barnes and Noble Review.  All of these experiences  makes for a unique perspective—a book that doesn’t insist on anything canonical, but exults in the sheer joy of reading, and sharing those pleasures with others.

I’ve known Jim since we were high-school poets together over forty years ago, and we’ve kept in touch throughout the years through our mutual love of reading.  I missed seeing him for the past decade, but that was largely because he wrote this massive book while also working a full-time job.  So we caught up in this conversation held in the studio of listener-supported radio station WGXC, in Hudson, NY a few weeks ago.  The following is an edited version of our chat.

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Thomas DePietro: This is a big book.

James Mustich: It is—it’s almost a thousand pages, nearly 900 pages of text and then various indexes to help people navigate through the list that I’ve made. For each of the thousand books I’ve written a brief essay, and added endnotes with relevant information and lots of recommendations for further reading. Altogether, there are more than 5,000 books referenced in it.

TD: Your publisher has done other books—this is part of a series of 1,000 things to do before you die.  

JM: Correct.

TD: Which accounts for part of the title. How did you become interested in doing it for books?

JM: The late Peter Workman started the series with a book by Patricia Schultz called 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which was quite successful, and gave him the idea to do others like it. We had been friends for some time, and he always took an interest in the business that I had at that time called A Common Reader, a mail-order book catalog that I produced between 1986 and 2006. One day, while we were talking about books, as we frequently did, he said, “You know, I’d love to do a 1,000 Things book about books.  Would you be interested?” And it took off from there.

TD: How many years ago was that?

JM: I signed the contract for this book 14 years ago. It’s been quite some time in the making.

TD: Right, and as you say, there are thousands of other books recommended, and notes, and various other addenda that you have to each entry. You haven’t published any books before, and you’re not in your twenties [laughter], what makes you qualified to write this book? Or let me rephrase that. What’s your background in the book world?

JM: One of my first jobs out of college (with an English degree) was in an independent bookstore, and I’ve been a bookseller of various stripes ever since then. In 1986, I started the catalog I referred to, A Common Reader, and for two decades we issued 15 to 17 catalogs a year—with the catalogs growing to about 144 pages each. I wrote about a lot of books for the catalog in that time, and it was a joy. You’ve worked in bookstores, so you know that in a bookstore setting, you don’t always spend your time selling the most interesting books. And you have to be there on Saturdays and when the weather is really nice, so the mail-order catalog was a way to pick the books that I wanted to sell and to share with readers. And also to write about them, which I loved doing.

So, in addition to my education, I’d say both the bookselling knowledge, from being in the store, and then doing A Common Reader for so long prepared me for the task of 1,000 Books, which is in some way a kind memorial version of the catalog.

TD: It’s not a “great books” list.

JM: No, not in the sense of a “canon.”

The idea is: What about books speaks to people? In general and then specifically. What has spoken to me in particular? There’s everything in here from, in terms of a reader’s lifetime, from Goodnight, Moon, to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s book about grief. And chronologically it ranges from the Epic of Gilgamesh up to a book published last year called Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman.

TD: Among the many books you recommend, some were published by The Akadine Press, an offshoot of A Common Reader. I like to think that you put your money where your mouth is.

JM: To be clear, what we did was reissue books we loved that had gone out of print.

TD: And some of those books have showed up on your list.

JM: Yes, there are several in 1,000 Books. A Mass for the Dead, by William Gibson, is one. Not the William Gibson who wrote Neuromancer, and whose Pattern Recognition I have in the book; that William Gibson is a first-class and visionary science fiction writer. The William Gibson who wrote A Mass for the Dead is most famous as the playwright who wrote The Miracle Worker, the play about Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, which later became a movie. A Mass for the Dead is his memoir of his parents, who were normal, non-descript people, growing up in the New York metropolitan area in the early 20th-century, and of his own growing up—how he, as he developed a literary vocation, kind of distanced himself from his roots and then came back to them as he started a family of his own. It’s just a very moving book.

“What about books speaks to people? In general and then specifically. What has spoken to me in particular? There’s everything in here from, in terms of a reader’s lifetime, from Goodnight, Moon, to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s book about grief.”

There’s another one called The Zoom Trilogy, by Tim Wynne-Jones, with pictures by Eric Beddows. It’s a compendium of three picture books about a cat—picture books for toddlers. I remember my elder daughter Emma loved these books and when her sister, Iris, came along, she did too. And they went out of print. So we tracked them down and put all three together in one volume.

The House of Life, by the ingenious Italian writer and critic Mario Praz, is in here. And A Palpable God, Reynolds Price’s revelatory translations of scripture. These were books that had been published by others first, but we brought them back into print because we loved and we wanted to sell them. Some of the books that we did have gone on to be picked up in The New York Review of Books Classics series or by David R. Godine in Boston.

TD: Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of composing, of compiling, your book. I’m not even sure how to describe it, because it’s a massive project. When people open it they’ll see just how massive it is, in terms of not just 1,000 books recommended but of all the extra material. How did you begin?

JM: I started, by first going through all the Common Reader catalogs that I’d published for 20 years and making a list of titles from there.

TD: So as much as we’ve emphasized the uncharacteristic books, there’s still a lot in there about certain great authors, though not always what you might think.

JM: Yes. I haven’t done a count, but there’s probably, say, 250 of the 1,000 that are what are generally considered classics, so you can trace in what I’ve done a kind of course, if you wanted to, in literary history. As I said, it starts with the Greek and Roman stalwarts, and moves through Dante and Chaucer, etc., up through all of the English novel, Jane Austen, Dickens, and so on. Sometimes with a little bit of an offbeat selection.

Toward the end of the project, I begin to realize something that was motivating me, somewhat unwittingly. I have two daughters, who are both adults, in their twenties. They have always been readers, and they couldn’t walk out of their rooms in our house without tripping over a pile of books. But they don’t have the constant sense of the continuum of literature that was so important to me when I was growing up, which, frankly, I absorbed from spending so much time in bookstores in my formative years—not enough fresh air! So I’ve been reconstructing all of that by my own lights as a kind of record for them, I think. Again, that wasn’t a conscious thing, but I think it’s certainly part of what gives my book its shape.  

The book, I should say, is arranged alphabetically by author, to give it a kind of serendipity, of undirected but purposeful browsing, that is one of the real joys of being in a bookstore—classification leavened by surprise. So, for example, in the T section, a reader will find D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s magnificent work of scientific observation, On Growth and Form, followed by Flora Thompson’s celebration of life in an English country village, Lark Rise to Candleford, then turn to Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Kay Thompson’s marvelous children’s book, Eloise at the Plaza. And that’s part of the fun.

TD: How did you deal with some of the categories? Military history. Sports. Were those already in your purview?

JM: I framed it for myself like this: what if I had a bookstore, and I could only have 1,000 books in it? I’d want to have classics, yes, but I’d also want to have something for anybody who walked in, and said, “I want a good mystery,” or ”I feel like reading something about golf.” Or medicine. Or theology. Or true crime.

One of the things I write about in my introduction is that inveterate readers read the way they eat: hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next.

TD: Right, and you don’t want to turn off readers who would think that this is just a highbrow production.

JM: Yes, reading isn’t all high-mindedness.

“The book, I should say, is arranged alphabetically by author, to give it a kind of serendipity, of undirected but purposeful browsing, that is one of the real joys of being in a bookstore—classification leavened by surprise.”

TD: So getting back to the nuts and bolts again, I’m curious. You started with the catalogs; I assume you narrowed down the list. As it got closer to a thousand, it must have been difficult. Was it harder to keep out, or keep in?

JM: It was harder to keep in, at the end. You know, for a long time, 1,000 seemed like so many. But then when I got towards the end, it was too few, by half at least! There are  just so many good books. And closing in on the 1,000 put a fine point on what, of course, had haunted me all along: there is so much I haven’t read. Through all the years I worked on the book, I tried to be thoughtful about it, but every week turned up books or authors I’d missed. And every conversation I had with a fellow reader seemed to add to that pile. As I’ve written in the book, once people know you’re writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the same way you did before. But sooner or later, I had to draw a line.

TD: And it is in fact a work of literary criticism. Every choice is an implied work of criticism, and then you have to provide a paragraph or more, actually much more than a single paragraph, about why you think a book is worth recommending.

JM: Right.

TD: Do you feel a sense of responsibility as a critic when you’re doing that?

JM: Oh absolutely. One of the things that takes so long is that you not only need to know enough about the book to have something to say, but you also need to know enough about a subject or an author to know what not to say.

TD: Can you give an example of that?

JM: If you’re going to write 500, 600 words about Darwin, or about Madame de Staël, or about Ishmael Reed, you want to know enough about the extent of their work to be able to judge what’s important, what to share with someone who may not have any context, and also know enough about the breadth and depth of their thinking to represent it credibly, especially if you’re dealing with someone outside one’s own tradition or one’s own education.

You want to be respectful of what you’re reading and you want to make sure that you have enough sensitivity and sensibility—or just enough sense with no suffix—to recognize that the work has its own existence whether you read it or not, no matter what you say about it, and to represent that in some way.

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.