BOOKS: What are you reading currently?
RUSSO: We go to Martha’s Vineyard for two weeks each September and just read. I read Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers.’’ I don’t usually like satire, but I always like Tom’s books. I also read a couple of books in manuscript. I get and read an enormous number of first novels.
BOOKS: Does that reading feel like work or pleasure?
RUSSO: Depends on how good it is. When the books aren’t so good I find myself, especially as I get older, resentful. I start thinking I was going to reread Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit’’ and the reason that I can’t is I’m reading this. A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, ‘‘Because I’ve always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.’’ I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.
BOOKS: Are there any books that have languished on your to-read list forever?
RUSSO: Like every human being who’s interested in literature, I have to say “The Brothers Karamazov’’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I mean has anybody ever read that book front to back? I bogged down one time in the middle and another time somewhere else. I’ve also never quite been equal to “Middlemarch’’ by George Eliot too. I get about to the same place every time. Everybody tells me if you get one chapter beyond that you can’t put it down, but I can’t get there.
BOOKS: Did you read during the summers you worked with your dad on the road crews in New York while you were in college?
RUSSO: Yes. It was a way of balancing those two radically different worlds. My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired. Yet reading was a way of not entirely losing the person who I would be when I returned to school.
BOOKS: Did you ever go through a phase when you didn’t read much?
RUSSO: About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn’t find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren’t good were good.
BOOKS: What are you reading next?
RUSSO: The galleys of a new book by a favorite writer, “The Great Northern Express’’ by Howard Frank Mosher. I just started it last night and already am halfway through. There’s not an iota of pretension in any sentence yet it’s not simple, just appears simple. After that, I’ve got a stack of galleys that piled up while I was on Martha’s Vineyard. And then there’s “Little Dorrit,’’ not to mention “Middlemarch.’’
AMY SUTHERLAND
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