Joseph Epstein is the author of 22 books, among them Snobbery: The American Version; Friendship: An Expose; the bios Fred Astaire and Alexis de Tocqueville; plus 10 collections of essays and three of stories. He has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Commentary and many other magazines. His latest book is Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 29, 2011). He lives in Chicago, where he was born and has lived most of his life.
On your nightstand now:
Three books: The Stories of Sholem Aleichem, High Financier, a Niall Ferguson biography of the German banker Simon Warburg, and Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, a splendid historical novel about the Spartans' stand against the Persians at Thermopylae.
Favorite book when you were a child:
John R. Tunis's All-American.
Your top five authors:
Leon Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, Max Beerbohm and George Santayana.
Book you've faked reading:
When young, these would have been too many to mention. I'm only now beginning to fill in my former fakeries. For a large notable example: I am currently on page 825 of 893 of the Penguin edition of The Brothers Karamazov.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, Arlene Croce's Dancing in the Dark.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Bible. I say, that's a joke, son.
Book that changed your life:
All great books change my mind, some a little, others a good deal. Having to name one, I would choose Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, which convinced me how secondary, make that tertiary, is the role of politics in the life of a thoughtful man or woman.
Favorite line from a book:
"Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold over the mind." --Plato's The Republic
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Surely you realize that you come off as an insufferable highbrow in your answers to these questions.
I do, and I fear that, when it comes to reading, I am an unrepentant one. I prefer to read only serious books, and I reserve my lighter pleasures for the movies and television. I have no wish, for example, to read a detective novel or a thriller, yet I love to watch both in the movies.