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| photo: Deborah Feingold | |
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities were chosen by readers in a NPR poll as being among the 100 greatest thrillers ever written, and Relic was made into a hit movie. Their recent novels include White Fire, Two Graves, Gideon's Corpse and The Lost Island. Blue Labyrinth (Grand Central Publishing, 2014) is the newest title in the Pendergast series.
On your nightstand now:
Douglas Preston: Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson (I was sent this manuscript so I could write a blurb and I can't put it down). Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff (I had no idea how complex, interesting and misunderstood Cleopatra was; this has got to be one of the most beautifully written biographies I have read in a long time). I'm rereading The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (a first-hand account of Cortés's conquest of the Aztec empire and the city of Tenochtitlan, a truly heartbreaking story). The Guns at Last Light by Rick Atkinson. (The final volume in his three-volume series on the defeat of Germany, this is a great book, and now I will have to read the first two volumes. Typical of me to read out of sequence.)
Lincoln Child: So many books, so little time. At present, my real and virtual nightstand includes: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand; The Swift Programming Language by Apple Inc.; Five Seasons by Roger Angell; and The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman. Oh, yes, and a play called Twelfth Night by some guy named Shakespeare.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Preston: I had many favorite books as a child, starting with Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who and the Hardy Boys series. But my all-time favorite was The Curious Lobster's Island by Richard Warren Hatch. I loved the humor and sense of adventure of this now forgotten story, which I read one summer in Maine.
Child: I had two: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and Dr. Dolittle's Circus by Hugh Lofting. My fifth-grade teacher was reading us Circus one chapter a day. I liked the story so much that I secretly checked the book out of the library and finished it way ahead of the rest of the class. That was the start of a period of voracious, omnivorous reading that didn't stop for decades. Come to think of it, it still hasn't stopped.
Your top five authors:
Preston: Leo Tolstoy for his immense humanity, Homer for writing the first and perhaps best thriller of all time, Wilkie Collins for his incredibly complex narratives and unforgettable characters, Isaac Asimov for his prophetic vision and Ernest Hemingway for how he transformed our American language and wrote stories that were true.
Child: Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Ernest Hemingway and H.P. Lovecraft. These are not only my top five authors, but also probably the authors who have been most influential on my own writing.
Book you've faked reading:
Preston: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I tried, I really did, and I felt guilty and stupid for not liking this book, until I realized that, in contrast to books like James Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, it was just too removed from basic human experience to qualify as a work of literature. And it was just too clever for its own good, like being at a party with someone a lot smarter than you, who wants you to know it, and know it and know it.
Child: I actually got 300 pages into Gravity's Rainbow back in high school before I gave up. I felt pretty smug carrying it around, too. But I felt neither guilty or stupid when I put it aside. I do, however, feel a little guilty (and stupid) for not reading Ulysses. I've tried several times, but I just can't get past that first chapter.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Preston: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. This is one of the most thrilling books I've ever read, starting with the apparition of the woman on the dark heath, with a narrative structure that seems far more avant-garde than Victorian. A work of genius.
Child: The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. This novelette is a neglected classic. The clever wordplay, droll references to fairy tales, fantasies and romances--real or imagined--make for an unforgettable reading experience. And, of course, there's the whimsically described yet terrifying Todal: "You've only heard of half of it. The other half is worse. It's made of lip.... It moves about like monkeys and like shadows."
Book you've bought for the cover:
Child: Jaws by Peter Benchley. Saw it in the bookstore window, bought it maybe 10 seconds later. Are great white sharks really that large?
Preston: Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen. The paperback had a photograph on the cover of a ship bashing through a fearful sea, which (combined with the name) promised a sea story of great intensity. I was not disappointed.
Book that changed your life:
Child: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. For the first time, I felt just about as close to a fictional character, reading this book, as I felt to my own self. It was an overwhelming and in some ways unsettling experience.
Preston: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. I read this as a young teenager and it left me in a daze for weeks afterward. It's an astonishingly original and inventive book, which made me, a 13-year-old boy, cry. Quite a feat.
Favorite line from a book:
Child: "I am haunted by waters." --Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Preston: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" --Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Which character you most relate to:
Child: Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I was in high school when I read it, and the gloomy, brooding, nihilistic fellow was strangely appealing (this was before I knew what a Byronic hero was). No doubt I'd feel differently if I revisited the book now.
Preston: Andrei Bolkonsky--at least, when I read War and Peace when I was 20, I strongly identified with the character. As Linc also says, if I were to reread the book at 58 (my current age), I might have a different reaction.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Child: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My father gave me this book as a Christmas present when I was a teenager, and it's one I'll always treasure. It's like a small but perfect jewel, a Fabergé egg.
Preston: The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. I read it one winter morning in my attic room when I was 17, during a snowstorm. You know a book is good when you never forget where you were when you read it.