I’ve just finished Tom Reiss’s outstanding and truly gripping work of biographical scholarship: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. I got it after finishing Ali and Nino, by “Kurban Said,” aka “Essad Bey,” aka “Lev Nussimbaum.” Ali and Nino, much of which is set in Baku, was given to me there by my friend Tural. It’s a brilliant book. Another young Azeri just brought me three copies in Russian for some friends and I am currently reading it in a German edition (the language in which it was written) that I bought when I was in Germany recently. My advice: read Ali and Nino before reading The Orientalist.
I should add that not only are these two books deeply interesting for what they say about identity, about love, and about other matters, but both are very much about liberty, about the terrible destructiveness of totalitarian socialism, and about one man’s doomed search for freedom during one of the most confusing, dangerous, and murderous periods in recent history.
Tom, how many books do you read in a year?! When do you find the time? What is your secret?!!!!
I don’t read as many as I’d like to read. I have several books going at any one time. I never — never — go anywhere without at least one book, just in case I find myself with a chance to read a few pages (or a few hundred). That includes the drugstore, restaurants, movie theaters, on ski lifts, in airplanes, on trains, everywhere. Sometimes I get to read five or six pages, other times I find myself stuck someplace and I’ll read a hundred.
I make notes with a mechanical pencil so I can find again interesting or useful passages. I also don’t insist that every book be read cover to cover (this one was, and obviously, the few novels I get to read are). And even with books that I do read cover to cover, I read with different styles, depending on the type of book and the density of information and the complexity of the analysis it contains. Different books call for different reading styles. Books are tools; if you have a hammer, you don’t have to hammer every nail in the tool box. You use it to fix your problems or accomplish your ends. (If I find that a book is just useless and I have no obligation to read it, I stop.)