JULIAN HATCH

Julian Hatch can’t remember not being able to read. “My mother taught me when I was four. Some of my earliest memories have to do with going to the library in the basement of the municipal building in Montgomery.” From the time he was eight until he was 25, he read almost exclusively science fiction. In his 20s, when he saw the connection between science fiction and the past (“a great part of sci-fi is about colonialism and post-colonialism”) he started reading more history and fiction.

The former photocopier repairman reads some 70 books a year. “Every month I try to re-read one book, and every month I read a classic, like something from Twain, Austen or Conrad.” And while he owns over 2,000 books—he added a third storey to his house to accommodate them—he still goes to the public library. “I’m on a more constrained budget now that I’m retired. I read them first from the library and then say, ‘I have to have that.’”

RECENT READS: The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word, by Ted Bishop; Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea, by Katherine Harmon Courage; and Rising From the Plains, by John McPhee. “The thing with McPhee is he can take a subject that is totally dull and you have to read every word of it, he makes it so interesting.”

THE BOOKS HE’D TAKE TO A DESERT ISLAND:

Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. “It took me 10 years to read it the first time.” Burnham’s Celestial Atlas Volumes I – III. “You’d never get tired of looking at the stars.” Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges Something by Robert A. Heinlein. “I’ve read most of them a number of times.” Something by H.P. Lovecraft Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake