James Hynes is the author of the novels The Lecturer's Tale, The Wild Colonial Boy and Kings of Infinite Jest as well as Publish & Perish, a novella collection. His new novel, Next, is coming out from Reagan Arthur Books in March. He lives in Austin, Tex. Find out more at jameshynes.com and follow him on Twitter @jameshynes.
On your nightstand now:
A couple of popular science books, Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey and Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane, which, believe it or not, is about mitochondria. I have a couple of novels going, too: Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, which is epic and immersive, and Julian Rathbone's enormously entertaining historical novel, The Last English King, about the Norman conquest. Plus The Lord of the Rings (again) on audiobook while I exercise every afternoon.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Like the road to Loch Lomond, my boyhood reading ran on two tracks. The low road was the Hardy Boys. I think I read all of them up to a point. The high road started when I was 10 and saw the film of Lord Jim, starring Peter O'Toole. I liked the movie so much I bought a Signet paperback of the novel at a Waldenbooks at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, Mich., and even though I didn't really understand it (and it wasn't anything like the movie), something in the book hit a deep spot in me, and I became a lifelong Conrad fan. Lord Jim and Nostromo are still my favorite novels.
Your top five authors:
Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Robert Stone, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf.
Book you've faked reading:
I've given up on books that everybody said I'd love, but I've never lied about having read them. Catcher in the Rye, for example, which I quit after the first couple of pages because I hated Holden Caulfield so much, and more recently, The Savage Detectives, which I gave up on after 50 pages. It's more fun to be an obnoxious contrarian than a liar, because you can watch people's faces when you say stuff like, "You know, I never finished Catcher in the Rye" or "The Savage Detectives is wildly overrated."
Book you're an evangelist for:
John Crowley's Little, Big. I've given away a dozen copies over the years. Other books I've forced on people, with varying degrees of success: John Banville's Doctor Copernicus, Georges Simenon's Dirty Snow, Jim Crace's The Gift of Stones, Eva Figes's Light, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, Kate Christensen's The Epicure's Lament, Adam Thorpe's Ulverton, Roger Boylan's Killoyle, Pat Barker's World War I novels, Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room, John Marks's Fangland, Max Crawford's Lords of the Plain, Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss, James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius, Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding, Geoff Ryman's Was and Judith Hawkes's Julian's House.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't recall ever having bought a book solely for the cover, but I did buy a science fiction novel once on the basis of the title alone: What Entropy Means to Me by George Alec Effinger. Turned out to be a really good book, too, very funny and wry.
Book that changed your life:
More than one: see above about Lord Jim and Little, Big. Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth and Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian started me down the road to perdition (i.e., atheism), and reading J.G. Ballard's short stories as a teenager led me to Kafka, Borges and Philip K. Dick. J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur started my lifelong love of ambitious historical fiction. Gravity's Rainbow showed me that anything is possible in fiction (though that may only work if you're actually Thomas Pynchon) (and for all you know, I am).
Favorite line from a book:
"There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless," from "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," by Jorge Luis Borges. And from Moby-Dick, "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Lord of the Rings. Now that I'm at an age where I don't really care what other people think, I can be completely honest: I love Tolkien, wholeheartedly and without reservation. I'm a geek, I'm a fanboy, I can say "farewell" in Elvish. I'm listening to it, in fact, on my iPod, for the umpty-gazillionth time, and much as I still love it, the one thing I wish I could do is read it again without knowing how it turns out. That first time, when I was 12 or so, was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Also, just so you don't think I'm a complete unsophisticate, James Joyce's "The Dead." The ending always hits me hard, but never so much as on a first reading. And I remember the time my high school English teacher had our whole class read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" silently to ourselves. You could tell when each reader got what Swift was actually proposing (and how fast each reader was) by the little, individual gasps that burst out around the room.
Had you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes, at least from the age of 10 or so. I won a writing award from Scholastic magazine when I was in junior high, and by time I was in high school, I was sending stories to the New Yorker (needless to say, they were sending them right back). I went to college to become an astronomer, ended up majoring in philosophy, but spent most of my time writing trippy little surrealist stories under the influence of Ballard and Borges. I won a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for three of them in 1976, and that little taste of literary glory sealed the deal. In fact, a year or so before I won, I met Borges in the university's Hopwood Room, where I sat literally at his feet with a bunch of other awestruck undergrads and listened to him answer questions and tell stories. I have no idea what he was really like, but he seemed like the only truly saintly man I have ever met.
