SIMON WINCHESTER
Author of The Meaning of Everything, Krakatoa, and The Surgeon of Crowthorne
I have a pretty unvarying routine while I'm writing a book, as I am just now (about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco) - and one of the aspects of this routine has it that, come bedtime, I read something that's entirely unrelated to whatever I'm writing about. So, no geology books for me after 10pm, no books on American history, nothing on Edwardian writing or the origins of Pentecostalism or on the makings of the Icelandic parliament - all connected to 1906. Instead, I turn to the old reliables. I've just finished Aleksander Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter (Vintage). I like to dip into Eleanor Wachtel's Original Minds (HarperCollins Canada) - interviews with George Steiner and other very clever people. I also have Alan Davidson's great essay on food history, which he gave in Amsterdam just before he died earlier this year. My own failing is that I have no patience with many modern novelists, other than Julian Barnes and James Hamilton-Paterson, whose Cooking with Fernet-Branca (Faber and Faber) is funny and clever - the kind of acute cleverness I admire. And there's always Lord Wavell's Other Men's Flowers (Jonathon Cape) and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (David R. Godine). My table wouldn't be my table without them
CHANG-RAE LEE
Author of Aloft, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life
I'm taking notes for a novel. This is a period when I read a lot. When I get deeper into writing my novel, I'll probably end up reading less. I read Old School (Knopf) by Tobias Wolff. I liked it a lot. I'm reading a short collection called Lucky Girls (Ecco) by Nell Freudenberger. A book that I'm looking forward to is The Dew Breaker (Knopf) by Edwidge Danticat. I'm always asked what I like reading and who are my influences. I love so many different things. I just love writers who seem to take special care with their language, as opposed to the people who are more story tellers. So, in that sense, I'm not as drawn to Dickens as I am to Proust. I like Hemingway, because he's definitely hearing the sentence and feeling the rhythm.
SHIRLEY HAZZARD