John Irving - By the Book - NYTimes.com I don't read in bed, ever. As for the main character of my novel "In One Person," Billy Abbott is a bisexual man; Billy would prefer having sex with a man or a woman to reading in bed. Where, when and how do you like to read? I get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed. I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter. Now (for the last two books) I write all my drafts by hand. It's the right speed for me - slow. When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed. The two novels I've reread this year are Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table" and Edmund White's "Jack Holmes and His Friend" - a seamless use of time (most notably, the flash-forwards within the memory of the past) in the former, and a clarifying delineation of different sexual points of view in the latter. They are two terrific novels. I hate the certainty with which literary works are categorized into one or another "genre"; this tempts me to say that my "favorite" genre is something not easily categorized - such as same-sex foreplay in gardens, with dogs watching at a distance. What book changed your life? Great Expectations. How old were you when you read it? And what changed? I was 15. It made me want to be able to write a novel like that. It was very visual - I saw everything, exactly - and the characters were more vivid than any I had heretofore met on the page. I had only met characters like that onstage, and not just in any play - mainly in Shakespeare. Fully rendered characters, but also mysterious. I loved the secrets in Dickens - the contrasting foreshadowing, but not of everything. You both saw what was coming and you didn't. Hardy had that effect on me, too, but when I was older. And Melville, but also when I was older. I'm sure the president has read James Baldwin, but he may have missed "Giovanni's Room" - a short novel of immeasurable sadness. That is the novel he should read - or reread, as the case may be - because it will strengthen his resolve to do everything in his power for gay rights, and to assert that gay rights are a civil rights issue. The gay-bashing among the Republican presidential contenders may be born of a backlash against gay marriage; whatever it comes from, it's reprehensible. What were your favorite books as a child? "My Father's Dragon," by Ruth Stiles Gannett. Were you an early reader or did you come to it late? A fast or slow reader? Did you grow up around books? I am a slow reader; when I'm tired, I move my lips. I almost read out loud. My grandmother read to me, and my mother - and my father. My father was the best reader; he has a great voice, a teacher's voice. Yes, I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around. You've often taught writing. What book do you find most useful to help teach aspiring writers? There is no one book that students of writing "should" read. With young writers, I tried to focus on the choices you make before you write a novel. The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference. The first-person voice and the third-person voice each come with advantages and disadvantages; it helps me to know what the story is, and who the characters are, before I choose the point-of-view voice for the storytelling. Two novels I taught a lot were "Cat and Mouse" (Grass) and "The Power and the Glory" or "The Heart of the Matter" (Greene). They were excellent examples of novels about moral dilemmas; I find that young writers are especially interested in moral dilemmas - they're often struggling to write about those dilemmas. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, but didn't? Everything by Ernest Hemingway. What don't you like about Hemingway?