the following is an interview from the NY Times interview series: By The Book

What books are currently on your night stand?

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book 2” is on top of the pile at the moment. You’d think, from where the bookmark is, that I’m near the end, but the book is so fat that that’s an illusion — I still have 100 pages to go. Another that I’m reading, this one in Norwegian, is by one of Norway’s pre-eminent fiction writers, Dag Solstad. It’s called “Armand V.,” and it’s entirely in the form of footnotes to a novel that does not exist but that we begin to imagine as we read this one. Another, lower in the pile, which I read a lot of in January and will probably return to, is David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, which makes early American history easy to consume and understand from inside. Along with that, I was reading a volume of the letters between Adams and his wife, Abigail. And one more book in Norwegian, the diaries of the poet Olav H. Hauge.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

I don’t think there can be such a thing as a favorite, since a different frame of mind requires a different kind of reading, and whereas in one mood I would want to read George Gissing, for example (19th-century English novelist, page-turner), in another I would need something a little more prickly and eccentric, like Beckett. Every novelist is so completely different, there is no way to choose a favorite.

Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?

There are many I admire. There are also many, many excellent novelists, essayists, critics, journalists and poets untranslated from the languages in which they write and which we in the U.S. can’t read. Some are eventually translated, but many of the most interesting are not, for the very reason (especially in the case of fiction writers and poets) that they may be so eccentric, so individual, so embedded in their culture that they are difficult or impossible to translate.

What is your favorite collection of short stories?

My favorite would have to be some Platonic ideal of an anthology that exists only in my imagination and that is composed of one story each from all the best story writers, past and present, including the usual suspects (Hawthorne, Hemingway, Mansfield, Tolstoy) but also less-well-known writers, like Jane Bowles and Lucia Berlin, and contemporaries not only from the U.S. and U.K. but from many other languages and cultures. It would be a wonderful anthology.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I like the challenge of reading fiction in other languages, especially languages I don’t know very well. It’s a good way to practice. In English, I tend to read older fiction, poetry, biography, history, sometimes economics and politics, writers’ diaries and notebooks, volumes of letters. And I always return to contemporary fiction and poetry. I suppose one genre I tend not to read regularly, for some reason — though I don’t deliberately avoid it — is drama. Though I do revisit Albee, Ibsen, Shakespeare and a few others from time to time.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

A Mickey Mouse comic book in Norwegian — I bought it to help me with the language. Ditto a couple of children’s books in Norwegian. Many different editions of the children’s classic “Bob, Son of Battle,” by Alfred Ollivant — I was collecting them. A book I’m actually enjoying a lot called “Studies in Lowland Scots,” by James Colville (published in 1909). A lovely little thick volume in Dutch showing different traditional costumes. Some old books by Lenin inherited from my father that haven’t yet found a good home.

Who’s your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

I have no single favorite, but I’ve always liked Flaubert’s two retired clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, in the novel of the same name; they live together in the country and spend their days in self-guided study, abandoning one discipline after another. They remind me of some of Beckett’s odd couples. I’m also fond of Goncharov’s Oblomov, who can’t bring himself to take action. (A cousin to another clerk, Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, who “would prefer not to.”)

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

I was a great reader, starting from age 8 or 9. Some of the books and authors that meant the most to me are not surprising — C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Frances Hodgson Burnett (“The Secret Garden,” “A Little Princess,” etc.), the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (“The Yearling”), Johanna Spyri (“Heidi”). Others not as well known: Alfred Ollivant (“Bob, Son of Battle”), George MacDonald (“The Princess and the Goblin”), Mary Mapes Dodge (“Hans Brinker; Or, The Silver Skates”), Kate Seredy (“The Good Master”), the Jalna series by Mazo de la Roche, Rumer Godden (“The Greengage Summer”). Many others.

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

Impossible question. One’s evolution as a thinking and feeling human being is so incredibly complex, and it never ends. So no single book can have that much influence.

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

I put many books down without finishing them, but not because they aren’t good — I get distracted by another book. As for disappointing, I remember when my younger son was reading the Harry Potter books, I thought it would be fun to read them along with him, since I knew that adults were enjoying them too. But when I tried the first one, I found the writing flat and shallow, and the characters less than interesting, so there went that idea. But at about the same time, my son was also reading the Philip Pullman trilogy, His Dark Materials, and when I sampled the first book, “The Golden Compass,” I was immediately taken with it. The writing is very good — you could see that right away, beginning with the first sentence — and the books are intellectually and imaginatively rich.

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

The only way I could ever read Joyce’s “Ulysses” was to return to it again and again — by which I mean I started it several times, read about 100 pages each time, gave up, then came back to it. Eventually I read it from start to finish, but not until I was actually living in Ireland and also had very few other books in the house.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

“Don Quixote,” “Tristram Shandy,” Diderot’s “Jacques le Fataliste.” There’s one other, but I’m too embarrassed to mention it. And then there are other classics that I think I should read, but haven’t yet — but then, no one else I know has read them either. For example — and someday I will read this, as I will read the first two I mentioned — Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

What do you plan to read next?

I have piles and piles of books waiting. Some that look particularly interesting are: Ali Smith’s “How to Be Both”; Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend”; Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” (which I’ve begun); the Catalan Josep Pla’s “The Gray Notebook” (a diary which he began when he was a young man and which he kept adding to and elaborating, within the individual entries, for nearly 50 years); Anne Carson’s “Red Doc>”; and “Samuel Beckett’s Library,” by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon. Oh, I’ll also be at least dipping into the three volumes of Beckett’s letters that have been published so far.

And in preparation for a trip to Austria and Germany in May, there’s a crime novel in German that I’m looking forward to: “Komm, Süsser Tod,” by Wolf Haas.