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By the Book

Geoff Dyer: By the Book

Geoff DyerCredit...Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

The novelist, essayist, critic and author, most recently, of “White Sands” says reading William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days” made him realize his whole life has been pretty much a waste. “I suspected this anyway.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

“The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Collected and Uncollected Poems (Volume 1),” edited and annotated by Christopher Ricks. I love the footnotes about the publishing history, the allusions and all that stuff. Makes me think I should check out the poems, too. Karen Solie’s “The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out”: perfect dream-prep after an evening watching concerts on YouTube “from those inconceivable days before / YouTube.” Arthur Lubow’s informative new biography of Diane Arbus: “Portrait of a Photographer.” There’s a load of others piled up beneath these as well: “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow,” by Leon F. Litwack; Adorno’s unfinished (in fact not properly started) “Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music”; Katie Roiphe’s “The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End.”

What’s the last great book you read?

“Barbarian Days,” by William Finnegan. Made me realize my whole life has been pretty much a waste. I suspected this anyway; he explained why: because I’d not surfed. The last great book I reread would be Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus,” which looks more and more like one of the most important postwar novels: epic and microscopic at the same time and stitched in prose of gorgeously sustained intensity.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I enjoy the kind of things I could never write: big history books that take seven years and multiple research grants to finish (finish writing, I mean, though they take ages to read, too — and then I retain almost nothing anyway). I don’t read “genre” fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” seemed pretty childish in that regard.

Tell us about your favorite short story.

“The Gardener,” by Rudyard Kipling. A mother goes to a large war cemetery on the Western Front in the aftermath of the First World War, looking for the grave of her son. She meets the gardener who is taking care of the cemetery. The sense of vast and unendurable grief is all the more powerful for being expressed with such restraint and economy.

And about your favorite poem.

“The Prelude,” by Wordsworth, or “Paradise Lost,” by Milton. “The Prelude” is part of my bloodstream practically, or maybe I mean metaphorically. Obviously parts of “Paradise Lost” are a total bore, but it’s worth the slog. After reading the scene where Adam and Eve eat the apple (“Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve / Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him / As wantonly repaid. . . .”), it’s hard not to concur with Terence McKenna’s claim that the expulsion was the original drug bust. The end is the most beautiful thing in all of literature; as Adam and Eve leave Eden they are us. Oh, and to bring things up-to-date, I love practically every funny, crazy and profound line in “It Is Daylight,” by Arda Collins.

And your favorite play.

“King Lear,” “Macbeth” or maybe “The Tempest.” I will never forget seeing the whole of Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech written on signs, a few phrases at a time, on the way out of Burning Man in 2001. For a while I had this stupid prejudice about going to the theater in London but I’m glad to say I’m over that now (that I no longer live there).

What moves you most in a work of literature?

Appeals to and expressions of solidarity. I am still moved by passages of Marx: the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” for example, where, after the famous line about religion being “the opium of the people,” he goes on to call it “the heart of a heartless world.” The single most moving passage I know is in “The Country and the City,” by Raymond Williams, where he looks at the big English country houses, describing their great beauty before adding, “Think it through as labor.” He then proceeds to do just that, reminding us of how long and systematic the exploitation and fraud must have been to have raised “that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labor, has managed to become, by the efforts of any single real family.” I also found much that was moving in “All on Fire,” Henry Mayer’s biography of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor of The Liberator. Last fall, in the Beinecke Library at Yale, I was able to see an original copy of the first issue of The Liberator (January 1831) with its famous editorial: “I will not equivocate — I will not excuse —I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard.” I was worried that the page might become tear-damaged as I looked at it.

How do you organize your books?

Mostly by subject but there are all sorts of subcategories and exceptions — often because of size —that make sense only to me. But I can put my hand on anything pretty quickly —even if it’s in the chaotic and always-expanding section of “overspill.”

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

The complete works of Alistair MacLean, the first writer I read in his entirety, author of the script that became the masterly film (with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton) that became the novel “Where Eagles Dare.”

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

I don’t know about “ever,” but the most recent would be Mavis Gallant’s “Paris Stories,” because if I’d not been given it I would have continued under the misapprehension that she wrote neat New Yorker-type stories, rather than these very strange, convoluted but weirdly perfect — and often sprawling — miniatures.

What’s your favorite TV, film or theater adaptation of a book?

It could only be Tarkovsky’s transformation of “Roadside Picnic,” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, into “Stalker.”

Tell us about your ideal adaptation of any book.

The essential thing is that it becomes a proper film — a piece of cinema — rather than just a filmed transcript or a page of celluloid, as it were. “Stalker” exemplifies this, in that it bears only a faint resemblance to the source material. As Tarkovsky said, the script has to dissolve into the film.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I didn’t read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock — the sword and sorcery novels —when I was about 13 or 14.

As a current resident of California, do you have a favorite book about the state?

I’m not sure it’s a book about the state but Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City,” set in Stockton, is tremendous (especially when read in the New York Review Books edition with Denis Johnson’s introduction). Another NYRB reissue: Darcy O’Brien’s wild little novel about growing up as the son of a famous actor in Hollywood, “A Way of Life, Like Any Other.” And I love Christopher Isherwood’s “Diaries,” recording his life in Los Angeles.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

He doesn’t need me to recommend books to him — this, needless to say, is not always the case with presidents. But if I were to give a book to the Queen of England it would be “The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy,” Tom Nairn’s classic republican (in the European sense) call to arms. I was excited to sit next to Helen Mirren at dinner once, even though her portrayal of the Queen has been a huge impediment to progress in this respect.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

D. H. Lawrence, Billy Collins and Rebecca West.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I take against books for all sorts of reasons and give up on plenty. The last one? Following on from the California question, a number of people recommended D. J. Waldie’s “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” but I found it so flat and dull. Maybe that’s the point; if so, I got that point early on, started skimming and then abandoned it completely.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

I guess the jazz book, “But Beautiful,” because I hit on a new form, a combination of criticism and fiction that was entirely appropriate to the subject matter. I’m also struck by the confidence I had back then, to write about this predominantly African-American art form that I’d only been listening to for a couple of years. I’d never have the confidence/arrogance to do that now. It also means a lot to me because musicians liked it (I can’t play a note on any instrument) and it was the first book of mine to be published in America.

Who would you want to write your life story?

My wife, Rebecca Wilson, because she loves the ongoing comedy and understood my mum and dad.

What do you plan to read next?

Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café”: a group biography or history of Heidegger, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty and others who have meant a lot to me intellectually even if I didn’t understand what many of them were saying.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 6 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Geoff Dyer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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