A Good Crowd

I read a lot of dead people.  I do.  Someone asked me the other day, "Who do you read that isn't dead?"  Seems it's a fair question.

First a word in defense of the dead, and then I'll get to it.  Sinclair Lewis once said a classic was any book you heard of before you were thirty, or words to that effect.  Having heard of more than I have had the chance to read, at fifty-two I still feel like I have a great deal yet to do in that line.  The difference now being that I am less concerned with being left behind.  If I never finish The Brother Karamazov, or Moby Dick, so be it.  I know where they are.  I haven't embarrassed myself.  I've read Proust.  I know my way around the literary canon.  Now I find I would rather read writers rather than working away at the famous books.  I've read more Carlyle than perhaps was good for me, but that was as much curiosity about the man as anything.  I wanted to know him, not to work my way through the Collected Works.  The list of what I've read that might be justly neglected is now nearly as long as any other I might make.  The point for me is that I know Lamb.  I know Dickens, and Thackeray.  I know Johnson better than I ever should have thought I would want or need to.

I don't read anyone now because he or she is in Westminster Abbey.  I am not collecting postcards of the great graves of English literature.  I read, at my leisure, the writers I want to know.  Huff puff.

When I was asked that question, what living authors I read, I decided the question was too broad.  What living writers do I read without exception, whatever they write, as they write?  Now that's a more interesting question, I think. Without thinking too hard about it, here's what I came up with tonight-- incomplete as it doubtlessly is -- my list:

Diana Athill, Paul Bailey, Sarah Bakewell, Aimee Bender, Alan Bennett, Brian Bouldrey, Frederick Crews, Michael Dirda, Joseph Epstein, Jonathan Evison, Michael Faber, Eric Foner, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jim Grimsley, Scott Heim, Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Holroyd, Gary Indiana, Clive James, Wendy Kaminer, Hari Kunzru, Hanif Kureishi, David Leavitt,  Penelope Lively, Javier Marias, John McPhee, Mark Merlis, Ethan Mordden, Les Murray, James Julius Norwich, James O'Neill, David Plante, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, David Sedaris, Antony Sher, Matthew Simmons, Colm Toibin, Jenny Uglow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Sarah Vowell, Edmund White.

I know I'm forgetting people.  Apologies.

Now, the first thing I notice is how few living poets I can name off the top of my head which is embarrassing.  Surely there must be more?

Still, the preponderance of novelists is not so high as it might be, as there are essayists, playwrights, historians and biographers mixed in, I'm glad to see.  Roughly as many Americans as English?  Seems to be anyway.  I won't count.  Fewer women than I should have thought.  Gayer than I expected.  The average age would seem to be roughly my age or older, but not everyone here is, and that's good.

Some didn't make the list because I simply haven't kept up in recent years.  I've read a full shelf of Edna O'Brien, but when was the last, and what was it?  What was Cynthia Ozick's last book and did I read it?  Joyce Carol Oates isn't on here because no reader could keep up with the woman, but anything in the way of scary stories and I'm there.

There are at least two contemporary novelists I've been reading since their first books, I think, but whose latest have made me wonder why: Jonathan Franzen and David Mitchell.  Hated Mitchell's last and was indifferent to the book before that.  Franzen's new book I don't doubt I'll read, but he begins to annoy me nearly as much as he pleases.  And neither has ever made me laugh, or even smile much and I'd rather than not, reading novels.

There are science writers from whom I've learned a lot, but I can't say I will ever read everything they write because I may never make it the whole way through even the things I've already read -- mostly: Roger Penrose, Matt Ridley, Jonathan Weiner, Edward O. Wilson (ants!).

It's clear I don't read my politics in books anymore.  Long gone the day.  I'm set very much in my ways.  I know how I'll vote, thank you, and for whom usually.

Philosophy, economics, art?  Alas.

The living writers I read with devotion are the writers I hope to keep reading, just as I don't know that I'll ever be done reading Dickens, or James.  I don't say that my taste tells the future.  I'm sure I could make just as long a list of living writers who I might once have seen as essential to me but no longer seem to be.  Why they should have been but aren't now I can't say.  I thank them here for what we once had.  I'm sure it's not you, it's me.  To list them here would seem caddish.

If anything, I think my list of the living will inevitably grow shorter with time.  (Diana Athill's ninety seven now, bless her!)  I'm just as sure there are new names to be added, I should live so long.  Whether it does or doesn't, my list today is not so bad as all that.  Frankly, I didn't think it would be so long as it is!

So, it seems I don't just read dead people after all, to answer the question.

Who knew?  I was worried I couldn't make a dinner party.  Turns out, I wouldn't have room for everybody on New Year's Eve.