In the Book Pages Q&A, the novelist answers questions about the books she loves and reveals a reading challenge.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels “The Hundred-Year House,” “The Borrower,” and story collection “Music for Wartime.” Her last novel, “The Great Believers,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among its other honors. Her latest isI’m doing this thing where I’m reading my way around the world, reading 84 books in translation. It’s a memorial for my father who died in 2020. He was a poet and also a literary translator.
I started in Hungary, because my dad was Hungarian, and I went through a little bit of Europe. My last book was Greek. I’m going to read this Turkish book, and then I’m going to do Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and then down the east coast of Africa. I’m putting it out on social media, and then I’m writing about each of them in myQ. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
When I was a child, I was obsessed with a Little Golden Book about Farmer Brown, called “A Day on the Farm” by Nancy Fielding Hulick. I just wanted to climb inside it, I loved it so much.My Hungarian grandmother was a novelist. She wrote about 40 books; they’re all in Hungarian. And my Hungarian is decent for an American, but rudimentary; I could not sit down and read a novel in Hungarian. I need to work with someone to translate for me, so that I can actually read a couple of these.
All of the above. My parents were linguistics professors, so it’s not like I grew up in some book-impoverished household. I can’t claim that I was rescued from a life of illiteracy. But I went to a wonderful Montessori school as a kid where we were read to every day for a half hour or so. My first-grade teacher would read us all these Roald Dahl books, which were just like crack for a first grader.
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