Tom Perrotta on His Reading Habits | Big Think

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Tom Perrotta talks about never getting around to reading what he should.

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Thomas R. Perrotta:

Thomas R. Perrotta is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated films. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Perrotta: You know, it’s actually a very funny thing, but my wife is often very frustrated with me because she’ll read a book that she really likes and she’ll say, “You’ve got to read this,” and I’ll just have to tell her, you know, “I can’t now.” It’s almost like a mystical thing for me. It’s like I know what I want to read right now, like… For some reason today I just had this sudden… I just saw some reference to Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” which I haven’t read, and I remember that a friend of mine had read it in college and said, “Oh, this book is really interesting because it’s called ‘Something Happened’ but really, nothing happens,” and I just was in a bookstore, like, trying to find it and I couldn’t find it, but I will. That’s the thing I have to read next now and, you know, it didn’t matter, you could tell me that you just read the best book in the world but I won’t be able read it now because I have to read “Something Happened.” But if two days go by and something displaces “Something Happened” I’ll probably go another 10 years before I read it, but I have a huge backlog of things that I need to read and I’m still sort of, you know, filling in big holes in my reading life. I was just in somebody’s house and they had a copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” right? And I know that I should read that book. And I’m still that kid, you know, whose teacher says, you know, read Moby Dick. Okay, I’ll read Moby Dick. So, I don’t read nearly as much contemporary stuff as I should, and I will say that the one thing that’s really happened to me over the past few years, mainly, [with as a result] of having kids and having, wanting to spend time with them but also just getting older, I read it late at night. You know, I read between, like, 10 and midnight, except that sometimes, you know, 10:15, I’m falling asleep, you know? So it takes me a long time to get through books and I’m often sort of embarrassed to be telling people, well, I haven’t read, you know, this or that really big book and it’s not because I don’t want to read it, I just haven’t been able to get to it.