How do you organize your books?
The books in our house are organized according to a secret protocol my wife has that I will never completely comprehend, but I somehow am able to find all of the books I’m looking for. It’s loosely based on topics, but also on the ages of books and the sizes of books. Which is helpful to me, because when I picture a book, I picture the size of a book, and my wife intuitively knows that. So on our bookshelves, there might be a music section, but then there’s a “big” music section. They don’t have to be next to each other, either, because you can use … I think it’s spatial memory, or something like that.
What’s the most inappropriate book you’ve ever received as a gift?
I received a book of Russian prison tattoos. It’s a lot of really hard-living-looking humans naked, showing their tattoos. It’s exactly what it sounds like. There’s not a lot of text. Just pictures of naked Russian men. That’s the first book that comes to mind in terms of inappropriateness.
What kind of reader were you as a kid?
I was — and still am — a pretty voracious reader. Especially after fifth grade or so, when they started having book fairs at schools and you could order books from a catalog, books about Pelé or U.F.O.s, or the Guinness Book of Records. But before that, when I was really young, we didn’t have a lot of books in the house. My mother loved magazines, and I would read everything from Redbook to Better Homes & Gardens … honestly, anything I could get my hands on. But the books we had were the World Book Encyclopedia, which was one big shelf in my parents’ house. I truly believed they contained all the information there was to know in the world. It would excite me, thinking it all sat right there. So I read those. I read them the way that people surf the internet today, maybe. I would just flip through them for hours and hours. So I know everything.
What do you plan on reading next?
“Poverty, by America,” by Matthew Desmond. I just started it. It’s not a particularly uplifting book, but it is enlightening, and shares a lot of information about how we got in this situation we’re in as a country, because of the way we treat poverty. I’m looking forward to learning more. Because on a daily basis, I look around and say, “Surely, there’s got to be a way to fix this.” That and gun violence — I feel like they’re both solvable problems, but we’ve all decided that they’re not.
