Roland Merullo is the critically acclaimed author of seven novels, including Leaving Losapas; A Russian Requiem, currently optioned for film rights by John Turturro; Revere Beach Boulevard, finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Prize; In Revere in Those Days, a Booklist Editors' Choice; A Little Love Story; and Golfing With God. His memoir, Revere Beach Elegy, won the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction. Breakfast with Buddha: A Novel, was published by Algonquin Books in October. Merullo lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters. Here he answers questions we put to authors:
On your nightstand now:
Unfortunately I tend to read a dozen books at a time, at the pace of a few pages a night, and will pick one off the bedside table depending on my pre-sleep mood. Right now I am mainly reading and admiring Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and, on other nights, the great yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar's Light on Life.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Chip Hilton series--sports books for boys: a lot of baseball heroism and drama, good kids and bullies, which was pretty much the story of my youth.
Your top five authors:
Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman.
Book you've faked reading:
A Russian Studies major as an undergrad and a Russian language and lit major in grad school, I never got more than about halfway through War and Peace, though I believe I wrote a pretty good paper on it.
Book you are an evangelist for:
James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I read it for the first time as a 23 year old, and was amazed that it seemed at least as good when I re-read it at 45. How many sophisticated intellectuals can make the invisible poor visible?
Book you've bought for the cover:
Sacred Places of Asia: Where Every Breath Is a Prayer by Jon Ortner
Book that changed your life:
Hands down, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Perfect read for a mixed-up college kid stepping out into the world.
Favorite line from a book:
It comes from Robert Stone's masterful novel, A Flag for Sunrise, where his drunken missionary priest says, of the mandatory daily prayer he refuses to recite, "I consider it wrongly written down."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Tie between The Great Gatsby and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Each in itself is a master class in the writing of English prose.
Qualities you look for most in books you read now:
Unusual structure, angle of approach and tone. A writer who can make the plain, everyday world sing without having to add too much forced drama. Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Sebald's Campo Santo and Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli would be examples.
Book that made you laugh:
Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence