Adam Gopnik

Welcome

Adam Gopnik has written his books at this desk, with Philip Roth, John Updike and the Marx Brothers looking down from the wall. Before the room is emptied, he wants to talk about reading.

Classics I Revisit Again and Again

The deepest reading he has done is rereading. He keeps a shelf each for A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, and the three words Mitchell gave him over lunch, a wild exactitude, still hang above his laptop.

• A Neutral Corner, by A. J. Liebling
• The Road Back to Paris, by A. J. Liebling
• The Honest Rainmaker, by A. J. Liebling
• The Bottom of the Harbor, by Joseph Mitchell
• Old Mr. Flood, by Joseph Mitchell

Guilty Pleasures

Straight from the Fridge, Dad, a dictionary of hipster slang, and the complete Ian Fleming in the original Signet paperbacks, which changed his life at ten. He rereads them without apology, and not all of them will make the move.

• Straight from the Fridge, Dad, by Max Décharné
• Autobiography, by John Stuart Mill
• The complete Ian Fleming, in the original Signet paperbacks
• The Restaurants of New York 1991, by Seymour Britchky
• The Complete Anthology of Rodgers and Hart, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
• The Yip Harburg Songbook, by E. Y. Harburg
• The Illustrated Discography of Surf Music, by John Blair

Some Masterpieces

Most great books are great at the beginning and the end, with long calm stretches between. He read Finnegans Wake as beach reading on Cape Cod one summer, and he does not pretend he caught every pun.

• In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
• A Small Boy and Others, by Henry James
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
• The Figure in the Carpet, by Henry James
• King, Queen, Knave, by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

Personal Voices of Writers I’ve Known

Alfred Kazin, met exactly once and read now as the friend he failed to make. Cathleen Schine, a dear old friend, whose novel The New Yorkers he calls the best 9/11 novel there is.

• Writing Was Everything, by Alfred Kazin
• The New Yorkers, by Cathleen Schine
• This Is My God, by Herman Wouk
• Portraits in Jazz, by Whitney Balliett
• In Love with Daylight, by Wilfrid Sheed

Treasured Titles I Must Leave Behind

Bill James’s Baseball Abstract from 1986, and a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he earned by writing its article on American culture. The books we leave behind, he says, tell as much about us as the books we keep.

• An American Lady in Paris, by Ella Mayo
• Baseball Abstract, by Bill James
• Dionysus, by Clifton Fadiman
• A Rich Brew, by Shachar M. Pinsker
• Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman

Personal Favorites I Can’t Live Without

His father, in his nineties, kept Pope, Shakespeare and Ulysses. Adam picks five of his own, and then remembers one more.

• The Duke’s Children, by Anthony Trollope
• The Early Stories, by John Updike
• The Road to Miltown or Under the Spreading Atrophy, by S. J. Perelman
• Cloudland Revisited, by S. J. Perelman
• Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, by Albert Camus
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger