The American author on the wonder of Little Women, re-evaluating Lolita and her belated discovery of Thoreau

My earliest reading memory
Andrew Lang’s Fairy books – the blue, yellow and violet ones. And the unadulteratedly grim Brothers Grimm, evocative phrases like “avenue of trees”, the now and then alluring English archaisms, the always expected three sisters or sons, the youngest first despised and then victorious.

The book that changed me as a teenager
A late teenager, at 17, and it was two books nearly simultaneously, both histories. One was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in dazzling prose. The other was Heinrich Graetz’s 19th-century History of the Jews, translated from the German, far out of date but distinctly not dated. (It was revelatory to learn much later that Kafka was immersed in this multivolume work.) Together they gave me a sense of the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous.