Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winning author, The Hours

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What was the book that most influenced your life -- and why?

When I was 15 I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, because a girl on whom I had a crush threw it at me and said something like, "why don't you read this and try to be less stupid?" I did read it and, although I remained pretty much as stupid as I'd been before, it was a revelation to me. I hadn't known, until then, that you -- that anyone -- could do such things with language; I'd never seen sentences of such complexity, musicality, density, and beauty. I remember thinking, "Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar." Mrs. Dalloway made me into a reader, and it was only a matter of time until I became a writer.

Michael Cunningham's favorite books:

• The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
  
  

"Richard Powers isn't easy. Neither is Joyce. He is, to me, our most important novelist of ideas. His ideas are enormous, and almost mind-bogglingly wide-ranging. He seems to know a great deal about almost everything."

• The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle
  
  

"Victor LaValle is, first and foremost, one of the most promising young writers around right now, he is also an African American author writing with great feeling, humor, and insight about African American lives. This, his first novel, is a gem."

• Open Secrets by Alice Munro
  
  

"She knows everything."

• Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
  
  

"My favorite crackpot. She was a rabid, ultra-orthodox Catholic, and the fact that she produced great literature from within a point of view I find almost reprehensible gives me hope for all of us"

• The Dead by James Joyce
  
  

"Maybe the most perfect piece of fiction ever written. "

• The Aspern Papers by Henry James
  
  

"Perfection, right up to the quietly lethal last line."

• Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
  
  

"Almost unbearable, period."

• Being Dead by Jim Crace
  
  

"Almost unbearably beautiful. A great meditation on life and death, on the soul and the body. One of the best books I've read in the last ten years. "

• The Manikin by Joanna Scott
  
  

"She's a genius. Joanna Scott is one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and just plain beautiful writers working today, and I don't understand why she's not more popular. The Manikin is not her most recent book, but it's the one I'd start with."

• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
  
  

"My favorite love story"

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  
  

"It contains almost everything a novel could possibly be made to hold, and it all takes place in a sanitarium on a mountaintop."

• Madame Bovary
  
  

"It's the ultimate demonstration of how an ordinary, and even despicable, character can become epic-sized, through the author's art and attention."

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  
  

"What was the book that most influenced your life -- and why?
When I was 15 I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, because a girl on whom I had a crush threw it at me and said something like, "why don't you read this and try to be less stupid?" I did read it and, although I remained pretty much as stupid as I'd been before, it was a revelation to me. I hadn't known, until then, that you -- that anyone -- could do such things with language; I'd never seen sentences of such complexity, musicality, density, and beauty. I remember thinking, "Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar." Mrs. Dalloway made me into a reader, and it was only a matter of time until I became a writer."

Rather than come up with a "Ten Best" list of summer books, I've come up with five categories of summer books, each of which contains more suggestions than any reasonable person could possibly want. I can never answer a question like this succinctly. These are all books that turn out to be much less forbidding, and much more fun, than one might expect them to be.

A classic you've been meaning to read for years.

• To the Lighthouse
  
  

• Portrait of a Lady by James
  
  

• Anna Karenina
  
  

• Madame Bovary
  
  

• Middlemarch
  
  

• Bleak House by Dickens
  
  

A first or second novel by a significant young talent

As a counterpoint to the summer's Big Intimidating Classic, I think we should all read something by one of the young Turks, to get a sense not only of where literature has been but of where it's going.

• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
  
  

• The Second Death of Unica Aveyano by Ernesto Mestre-Reed
  
  

• The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
  
  

• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  
  

• A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo
  
  

• Midsummer by Marcelle Clement
  
  

• American Woman by Susan Choi
  
  

A novel of a sort you'd ordinarily never read

Until this year I hadn't read any fantasy, science fiction, or horror novels since I was an adolescent, when I read so many of them I gave myself a hangover that lasted well into my forties. Lately, however, I've been reading genre fiction as research for the novel I'm working on. Some of these books have been revelatory. I've learned that if we select all our books from any particular section of the bookstore or library, we miss a lot of the most compelling stuff.

I think that every summer we should all read at least one novel of a sort we'd ordinarily never go near; something we believe a person like us simply would not read. Selections from this category are naturally private and personal, based on your own reading history. Some of my own forays into previously uncharted territory include the following:

• Spider by Patrick McGrath
  
  

"Gothic novels are wonderful, most prominently Spider and Asylum"

• Asylum by Patrick McGrath
  
  

"Gothic novels are wonderful, most prominently Spider and Asylum"

• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
  
  

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  
  

• Idoru by William Gibson
  
  

• The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
  
  

"Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, The Golden Compass (which is the American title -- it was published originally in England as His Dark Materials), is miraculous. Even if you think you hate fantasy. Really."

• The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2)
  
  

"Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, The Golden Compass (which is the American title -- it was published originally in England as His Dark Materials), is miraculous. Even if you think you hate fantasy. Really."

• The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1)
  
  

"Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, The Golden Compass (which is the American title -- it was published originally in England as His Dark Materials), is miraculous. Even if you think you hate fantasy. Really."

Some contemporary poetry

I, who worry about such things more than many do, am squeamish about the fact that few of us could name five living American poets. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

The most accessible way to look for poets who move you is the annual Best American Poetry series, which is compiled each year by a different American poet. The 2003 collection was edited by Yusef Komunakaa. A few of my own favorite books of poetry are:

• Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse by David Trinidad
  
  

"The grandest oddity of recent time, a truly marvelous book"

• Repair by C. K. Williams
  
  

• The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky
  
  

• The River Sound by W. S. Merwin
  
  

• What the Living Do by Marie Howe
  
  

• Field Guide by Robert Hass
  
  

• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
  
  

The purely fascinating

Finally, I think every summer should include one or more books that increase our storehouse of information but do not do us any practical good whatsoever. Among my own books slated for this summer are:

• Original Miscellany by Schott's Schott
  
  

"I think it should be in every summer cottage. How else would any of us know how to identify different cloud types, the provisions carried by the Titanic, and the entire list of officially recognized phobias? "

• Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
  
  

"which according to several friends is without question one of the best books ever written about a fish (Moby-Dick doesn't count, whales being mammals)"

• Positively Fourth Street by David Hajdu
  
  

"a biography of Bob Dylan"

• The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
  
  

Source:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com

Michael Cunningham Who?

Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in La Cañada, California. He received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. His novel A Home at the End of the World was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990 to wide acclaim. A film version was directed by Michael Mayer, and featured Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts and Sissy Spacek.

Flesh and Blood (FSG), another novel, followed in 1995 and is currently being adapted into a miniseries for Showtime.

In 1999 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel The Hours (FSG). A film adaptation of The Hours was directed by Stephen Daldry, and featured Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and Meryl Streep.

In June 2005, his latest novel, Specimen Days, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is now available as a Picador paperback.

His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. "White Angel," a short story, was chosen for The Best American Short Stories, 1989, and another story, "Mister Brother," appeared in the 2000 O. Henry Collection.

Michael Cunningham is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award (1995), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988), and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa (1982).

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