Book Brahmin: Michael Downing
Michael Downing's memoir, Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure, is being published this month by Counterpoint. His novels include Breakfast with Scot, which was recently adapted into a film, and Perfect Agreement (available in a new edition from Counterpoint in December). His nonfiction ranges from Spring Forward, a social history of Daylight Saving Time, to Shoes Outside the Door, a narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery founded in the West. He teaches creative writing at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Mass. To read more about his books, go to MichaelDowningBooks.com.
On your nightstand now:
I don't read in bed, so my nightstand is devoted to a radio for late-night BBC broadcasts. Today, though, I'm finishing Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (one superb sentence after another); carrying on with A History of Private Life (a vast collection of facts and speculation, which Georges Duby assembled and edited); and hoping to lay my hands on the latest from the great Donna Leon.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Golden Encyclopedia. I was constantly delighted to find that somebody knew exactly what I wanted to know.
Your top five authors:
This is a test I fail every time I take it. How about five writers whose every book I love enough to urge it on friends: James Baldwin, Peter Cameron, Charles Dickens, Penelope Fitzgerald and P.G. Wodehouse.
Book you've faked reading:
Anything by Norman Mailer I ever claimed to have read to the end.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. It's what all psychological novels ought to be--precise, funny, genuinely surprising and unfettered by the limits of diagnostic psychology.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. It was my first (of many) of those beautiful paperbacks with removable covers produced by North Point Press.
Book that changed your life:
The Death of Virgil. It tracks Virgil during his last 24 hours on the earth, and he's determined that the text of The Aeneid must be burned before he dies. That novel opened a gate to a long road and led me to Musil, Frisch, Yourcenar, Canetti and Sebald--writers who rank right up there with Virgil.
Favorite line from a book:
"This book is personal, with an original theme." It's the first line of Seeds of Change by Henry Hobhouse. It's a promising premise--and the book delivers.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Every inventive page of that novel seemed to me the smartest, funniest and scariest thing I'd ever read. I envy anyone who hasn't read it yet.
