I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment." I was just floored by that story. I couldn't understand it. I still don't. I'm talking about something I read more than 50 years ago. That story left a little scar on me.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.