Lauren Groff: By the Book

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was a shy child, and vastly preferred books to people, so I devoured absolutely everything with no discernment at all until I was in middle school, which is excellent training to be a novelist. With my own little boys, I reread the work of Jean Craighead George, in particular “My Side of the Mountain” and “Julie of the Wolves.” Over the decades since I first found the books to be rollicking adventure stories, they’ve become chilling horror stories of lonely children lost and desperate to survive in unforgiving wilderness.

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

(Laughs, weeps, dies a little inside.)

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

It would be inane to ask museumgoers to rate the paintings they see: With visual art, there’s an understanding that the viewer’s objective stance heavily influences the perception of the work. Online rating systems have made otherwise smart people view books as commodities. It’s true that not all books aspire to art, of course; but if a book that does aspire to art is treated as a commodity, readers do it a vast injustice by overlooking their own responsibility in the success or failure of the work. A reader does at least half of any book’s heavy lifting. It’s sometimes hard work, and there are certainly objective measures of quality in writing, but I try to assume that when an otherwise celebrated book doesn’t connect with me, it’s because of who I am when I read it, not because of the book’s own inherent badness. If I try again later, maybe the book will resonate with a future me. This happened with Christina Stead’s “The Man Who Loved Children,” which I hated the first three times I tried to read it, then on the fourth, I discovered it to be a work of genius.

What do you plan to read next?

I don’t plan to read these books next, per se, because some haven’t been written yet, but I hope to read very soon the debut work of the brilliant new writers Alice Sola Kim, C Pam Zhang, Mesha Maren and Sonya Larson.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

This is a fantasy, so instead of three writers, I would invite every woman writer I have mentioned here, plus hundreds of others I did not have space to name. I would serve unlimited quantities of excellent wine and we would get blitzed and the conversation may eventually meander to touch on that most baffling of questions: When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by — as in this very column, week after week — why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives? It can’t be because men are inherently better writers than their female counterparts (this would get a huge laugh. After all, Toni Morrison, Can Xue, Marie N’Diaye and Elena Ferrante are in the room!). And it isn’t because male writers are bad people. We know they’re not bad people. In fact, we love them. We love them because we have read them. Something invisible and pernicious seems to be preventing even good literary men from either reaching for books with women’s names on the spines, or from summoning women’s books to mind when asked to list their influences. I wonder what such a thing could possibly be.