On reading cookbooks and sci-fi
tween sci-fi, classic literature, and mystery novels. I rarely read popular science books. I just started Dennis Rasmussen’s “The Infidel and the Professor,” which is a joint biography of the philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume. It’s pretty good but a little academic. I’m waiting to hear about Hume and Smith but Rasmussen wants to tell me the whole history of Scotland first.
BOOKS: Are you a regular biography reader?
CARROLL: One of my favorites is Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, this quirky, hugely influential 20th-century philosopher. He’s notoriously difficult to understand, and I understood his philosophy better from that biography than from reading Wittgenstein. But honestly, I don’t read a lot of biography.
BOOKS: What was your last best read? CARROLL: “Gideon the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir. A quote on the cover reads, “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” It’s hilarious. It does something that is difficult, to be weird without being goofy.
Is science fiction your favorite
BOOKS: genre?
CARROLL: I grew up reading sci-fi, writers like Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and Ursula Le Guin. Iain Banks is my favorite contemporary writer. He alternated writing literary fiction with science fiction.
BOOKS: Which came first, your interest in science or your science fiction reading? CARROLL: Science. There were influential books like George Gamow’s classic “One Two Three … Infinity” and, of course, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach.”
Were you a Stephen Hawking
BOOKS: reader?
CARROLL: By the time “A Brief History of Time” came out, I was an undergraduate physics major. Like a lot of people who knew some of what he was talking about, I found it hard to understand. I certainly admired how many books he sold.
BOOKS: What is the last classic that you read?
CARROLL: Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” I want to write a novel some day and, the way that my brain works, I have to understand the theory of writing one first. Someone recommended reading “Gatsby” to understand how to plot a book. “Gatsby” is well done, but the characters’ concerns are not mine. When I read Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which I do every two years, those characters’ concerns are not mine either but, somehow, I get them.
BOOKS: When did you start reading fiction?
CARROLL: When I was an undergraduate my friends mostly studied astronomy and physics. At Harvard, there were people in the dorm studying other subjects, like sociology and comparative literature. I met people reading Flaubert for pleasure. That was weird to me.
BOOKS: Did reading fiction come to you naturally?
CARROLL: It was hit and miss at first. One of the first Austen novels I read was “Mansfield Park,” which is not her best. You have to learn that just because a book is a classic, it may not be your speed. I learned to read for pleasure, not for homework.
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