What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
I first toyed with the idea of writing because I was so affected by what I witnessed as an infectious diseases specialist during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, taking care of dying men (mostly) who were my age. My older brother, George, must have tired of hearing me talking about writing (which is much easier than actually writing) because he gave me “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within,” by Natalie Goldberg. It was my brother’s inscription on the title page more than anything else that started my writing career: He wrote, “SO WRITE ALREADY!”
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I grew up in Ethiopia, the child of Indian parents who were hired there as physics teachers. There was no TV, not until I was a teenager. I was a precocious reader and books were a gateway to a world more exciting than the one I lived in. I liked Enid Blyton’s “The Secret Seven” series and, later, “The Hardy Boys.” When I discovered C.S. Forester’s seafaring novels following the career of the fictional Horatio Hornblower, I felt I had stumbled onto a gold mine. (I still reread those volumes and they remain just as enjoyable.) Looking back, by the age of 10 I was clearly on a quest for content that was prurient and salacious. At an early age I stumbled onto “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which quickly demoted the Hornblower books and Dumas’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” from my list of favorites. I’m ashamed to say I picked up W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” because the title seemed promising! While it didn’t have the lascivious content I’d imagined, it turned out to have something better: It was the book that, as mentioned above, called me to medicine.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
Many of my esteemed medical colleagues seem to read only “serious” books — meaning nonfiction in the form of biography, political memoirs and the like. As a reaction to that, perhaps, I mostly read fiction these days. I like to remind my nonfiction-reading friends that it was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” not a politician or a political scientist, that made slavery distasteful to many Americans. (That being said, Stowe’s own views on racial equality were reprehensible.) I preach to my medical students that to fully imagine their patients’ lives they must read fiction, because fiction is the great lie that tells the truth (to paraphrase Camus). You can read a textbook on “end of life,” but to come close to being in the shoes of a patient with a terminal condition, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is the required text. Similarly, Dorothy Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” will make you viscerally feel what child abuse is like, something no pediatric textbook can convey.
I’ve always liked mystery novels (Patricia Highsmith, John le Carré, Georges Simenon, Louise Penny, Walter Mosley), but during the pandemic my appetite for them kicked into high gear and I devoured like bonbons the works of Attica Locke, Peter Grainger, Olen Steinhauer, Henning Mankell, Mick Herron and Caimh McDonnell.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Jim Harrison for sure, because the man can cook plus he’ll bring the wine; I’m just hoping he won’t frighten away my other two guests: Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor.
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?
“Finnegans Wake.” If anyone knows what the book is about please let me know. On second thought, don’t.
