Michael Lewis

There’s a book, I’ve never seen anybody talk about it or write about it, but when I read it, I thought, in a funny way, it was helpful for Liar’s Poker. It was a book called The Innocent Anthropologist. Every now and then, and when I can find it, I give that away. Because again, it’s a surprising book.

Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, essentially comic memoirs. Just really funny books. They’re books that I just found moving in all kinds of ways that are odd books that I’ll go grab and send to people.

There are memoirs that I’ve given more than once to people. Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs.

My pandemic reading gift I’ve been giving to people, because it’s a perfect pandemic novel, is Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, and it’s about a Russian aristocrat who, during the Revolution, he’s the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn’t shot. Instead, they lock him up in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn’t leave for the next 50 years.

So you were stuck inside this place, and it’s Eloise for Grownups, and just beautifully done, but it makes you, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space.

I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just an incredible pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. There are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, a book just pops out of them, and it was their one book.