Alex Cuadros: Brazil, Billionaires and Books

I usually say I’m a journalist, because saying I’m a writer sounds pretentious. When I used to cover the ultra-rich as a full-time job for Bloomberg News, my title was “billionaires reporter,” but I usually held back on that, too.

Right now I’m reading Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, who has a style very much his own and a rare talent to mix a casual voice with easy humor and then suddenly dive into these deep reflections on subjects that I personally would struggle to turn into actual stories. And I just started Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore, because I loved Joseph Mitchell’s old New Yorker pieces on Joe Gould.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King. I first fell in love with reading with books like this one—fantastical, apparently commercial (or at least marketed as such), but which was the perfect thing for my boy-imagination. It took much longer for me to get into “serious” books.

I knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to be a writer. In fourth and fifth grade I had an amazing teacher named Sandy Lethem who gave us long fiction-writing assignments, and I loved these. But even into college, I imagined I would write fiction or poetry. It was only later that I got into journalism, and discovered nonfiction as a literary form, too.

Probably shocked that I could possibly be interested in the world of money, which always seemed so boring to me. But I always had a problem with authority, so I’d hope that my school-aged self would appreciate how I try to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire.

I almost always read in bed before going to sleep. It’s the only way I can slow down my brain after a usual day of absorbing ridiculous amounts of news and social media. While researching my book, though, I often read for hours a day, most often while lying on the floor of my living room, which I found to be the most comfortable position for my back.

After college, I worked as an editorial assistant at the publishing house W. W. Norton. I had never been very interested in nonfiction before, but I worked on a lot of nonfiction books while there, and this is really what turned me onto this form of writing. Some of the books I most enjoyed working on while there were: Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein, The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani, City of Oranges by Adam LeBor, and Palestine Inside Out by Saree Makdisi.

My godfather, David Sullivan, took it upon himself to expand my literary horizons since I was a kid. When he gave me a copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, I was 16 and I became totally obsessed with it. Later he turned me onto The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. I still have a few books on my shelf that he gave me before his death in 2013 that I need to read.

I love fiction, but I rarely read it these days. The stakes are higher. If a novel isn’t very good, you don’t get much from it. If a nonfiction book isn’t very good, you may at least learn something. And yet when I think of my favorite authors, many of them are fiction-writers: Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Saul Bellow.

I think the world might be a better place if people read more books (and not just because it would grow the market I’m trying to sell my work to).

I just finished reading Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, which is about black-on-black homicide in South Central Los Angeles. This book really has everything. She got such intimate access to the people in her book; there were a couple of moments where I was actually brought near tears. But it’s also riveting, with the pace of a crime thriller. And on top of all that, she has a bold, convincing thesis about why this kind of crime thrives in these neighborhoods.

I strongly prefer print books. I like to write in the margins, dog-ear pages, and it’s just not the same to make these markings on a Kindle. And I like to see the books on my shelf. It’s my one true material fetish.

I don’t think there is one.

River Town by Peter Hessler and Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis have both been important references for me, in terms of style and how to put together a narrative.

Because of my work, over the past few years I’ve read a lot about Brazilian history, billionaires, and business in general. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I want to read a lot more American history. And to keep myself from becoming too specialized or pigeonholed, I want to read more essays and literary nonfiction.

Ha! I couldn’t possibly imagine at 33 years old.