Anthony Doerr: By the Book

What kind of reader were you as a child? Your favorite books and authors?

In my parents’ house, books tower atop pretty much every piece of furniture: on the toilet tanks, inside kitchen cabinets, even on Dad’s workbench in the basement. There might even be books in the garage (beekeeping manuals probably). So I grew up in a world where books were both totemic and ubiquitous: On Wednesday nights, my brothers and I were allowed to bring books to the dinner table and read while we ate. I loved Jules Verne and C. S. Lewis and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” and “Where the Red Fern Grows” and “White Fang.” Just glimpsing the blue spine of a Hardy Boys volume or one of those bright illustrations from “The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, can flood me with memories so visceral that they stop my breath.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

Gosh, I’m not sure. Last year I brought an Eliot Weinberger essay collection to my son’s lacrosse practice and took a wayward ball to the shin because I was sitting too close to the field. I did read “The Sheltering Sky” when I was 11 or 12 years old. (“Mom, what’s hashish?”) But I don’t think I got in trouble for it; on the contrary, I was incredibly blessed, because neither my mother nor the local librarians ever said: “This is outside your age range, Tony. You can’t handle this.” They trusted us to make our own paths through books, and that’s very, very empowering.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

Here’s a strange answer: “Be True to Your School: A Diary of 1964,” by Bob Greene. I don’t remember much about the book itself, but our 10th-grade English teacher, Mr. Jay, had us read the book, then keep a daily journal. I fell immediately in love with the ritual, the work of transcribing my days into sentences. When summer arrived, I didn’t stop; I haven’t really stopped since. I like to think that maintaining that practice all these years — translating experience into language — has helped me become a more attentive person.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Maybe “The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One,” by Sylvia Earle. It’s a levelheaded plea to curb our destruction of the world’s oceanic ecosystems; Earle is urgent without ever becoming indignant, and everyone in a position of power needs to pay a lot more attention to the health of our oceans.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

Oh, I’m not very interested in my life story. “Bald guy goes for three-mile run, walks the steep parts (unless he thinks someone is looking), then purchases chicken breasts, tape and raisins at the grocery store.” That kind of stuff doesn’t make for riveting chapters. That said, if Lucretius or Pliny the Elder or Livy were transported to 2015 and set up comfortably in an apartment in, I don’t know, Tampa, and given a year to write a book about contemporary America, I’d be the very first in line to read it. I’d like to read Herodotus on Obamacare. Pliny on the Dorito.