More surprises

I wrote last week (Aug. 16, 2017) about my surprise that several authors interviewed in By the Book give what Michael Connelly calls "a short leash" to books by other writers. But that was just one of the surprises for me in Pamela Paul's collection from The New York Times Book Review, which she edits. Here are some others.

J.K. Rowling doesn't read fantasy

You might expect the author of the Harry Potter books, one of the most successful fantasy series in literary history, would be a reader of fantasy novels written by others. But apparently not. This may be why the Harry Potter series strikes readers as being so unique. She didn't, deliberately or not, borrow ideas from others.

The book that had the greatest impact on Richard Dawkins was The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle

It shocks me that The Black Cloud, a science fiction novel I read as a teenager, could have had a significant impact on anyone's life. It wasn't very good, and Dawkins admits as much. At least as a work of fiction it wasn't very good, but Hoyle was one of the major astronomers of his day, and Dawkins said he "learned more science from it, at a formative age, than one ever expects from a work of fiction."

The novel may also have been important to Dawkins because, like himself, Hoyle was an outspoken atheist. Although he coined the phrase "the big bang," Hoyle rejected the idea of the big bang to explain the origin of the universe, preferring the theory that the universe has always been either expanding or deflating and will continue to do so forever. Just as some Christians reject the big bang theory because it is inconsistent with the book of Genesis, some atheists reject it because it is consistent with Genesis, namely the idea that everything had a beginning, out of nothing.

James Patterson admires James Joyce

Somehow I wouldn't have expected James Patterson, whose many thrillers are among the best-selling books of our time, to read, let alone idolize, James Joyce. Yet he says, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce and Gunter Grass are important to me because their writing made it crystal clear that I wasn't capable of the write stuff. Those three dream-killers are still among my favorites."

So apparently, if he had his druthers, Patterson would prefer to write great literary works that few people read than thrillers that millions of people read.