Andrew Klavan: Books Worth Reading Again and Again

I say I’m a writer.

I am currently reading Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich.

Not sure. I particularly remember reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens when I was still little. I begged my mother to get it for me because I loved the movie. I was so proud of having read it, and so disappointed when I realised it was abridged!

Depends how young. When I was a kid, I loved the Greek myths, and they are foundational stories, so maybe those.

I remember writing a mystery/adventure story starring me and my friends when I was about twelve.

The worst job I’ve ever had was being a busboy in a train station diner.

My advice would be to read the classics and get a workbook that will teach you impeccable grammar.

I’m a slow reader, so I would say I read as much as I can, about a book a week.

You should know the King James Bible and Shakespeare well. All our ideas come from them and much of our language. If you are a product of western culture and haven’t read them, you don’t know who you are or where you come from or why you think what you think.

Many. I go back to Shakespeare and the Bible all the time for the reasons stated above. I’ve read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky several times because it had such a huge impact on me. The older I get, the more I reread books I love.

Really depends on who they are and what I think they’d like. For history buffs, From Dawn to Decadence by Jaques Barzun. For recent fiction, probably The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. For great old fiction, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

Shakespeare, John Keats and Dostoyevsky

I like strongly plotted literary fiction – Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, say — and books that bring a brilliant idea to a good subject — like From Dawn to Decadence by Jaques Barzun or The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism by M.H. Abrams, or The Weight of Glory or The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.

Incredibly lonely. You could only communicate with living people. It would be a very limited existence.

Not right now. I’m likely to pick up Tom Wolfe’s latest or Donna Tartt’s. When Patrick O’Brian was still alive, I practically camped out at the bookstore waiting.

Maybe not completely, but close. I love real books, but it’s the words that matter, and digital is easier to carry around and annotate.

I think westerners need to relearn their foundational culture — Homer, Plato, Ovid, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. — without professors putting their theories in the way.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It rescued me from relativism and thus from the age.

Plenty. The Iliad by Homer, Metamorphoses by Ovid, Dickens – probably David Copperfield but also Bleak House. The Ambassadors by Henry James. I could go on forever.

I’ll probably be reading a lot about the English Romantics next year.

I did write one actually. It’s called The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.