February 04, 2018

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that is most underrated"):

It was (rightly) praised when it was published, but I wish more people who read Wolf Hall would also read Hilary Mantel’s earlier work, which is so nasty, funny and delicious: Every Day Is Mother’s Day? Vacant Possession? An Experiment in Love? All so wonderful. Also, he has a much bigger audience in the UK than in the US, but I do love Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls.

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book I wish I’d written"):

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Though really, there are scores of them. You know you’ve read something special when your blinding jealousy is eclipsed (barely) by admiration.

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that changed my life"):

So many. But I’ll say Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. My father gave it to me (he reread it as I read it) and it was a revelation. I didn’t understand much of it – it was probably the first book for adults I read – but even so, I comprehended enough to recognise that it was, in part, a betrayal of the author’s history, even as it was a tribute to it. That was an important early lesson. Much of my early reading was informed by my father and his tastes: together, we read Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, VS Naipaul, David Leavitt, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, and, of course, all the great Japanese modernists. And lots of early Roth.

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that changed my mind"):

I have never and will never read anything like Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that influenced my writing"):

I don’t know if it influenced my writing, necessarily, but one of the books I return to frequently is Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters: a near-perfect novel.