Jonathan Franzen - By the Book - NYTimes.com During a dark moment in his early 30s, the author of "The Corrections" and, most recently, "Farther Away: Essays" took solace from the self-help book "The Dance of Anger." What's the best book you read in the last year? I loved Rachel Kushner's "Flamethrowers." I also have to mention Mario Vargas Llosa's "War of the End of the World" and Milan Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being." Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). The book creates the experience. If I'm loving something, I suddenly discover large chunks of reading time that I wasn't aware of having. But I will say there's nothing like being stuck in a middle seat on a long flight that begins with a two-hour delay. In a situation like that, a few years ago, I'd brought along a new novel that critics were wild about and that I was certain I would enjoy. It was so boring and dead that after 50 pages I just closed it and stared at the seat-back tray and suffered, resenting the author and psychoanalyzing the critics. Conversely, on an even worse pair of flights, from Zagreb to New York by way of two London airports, I'd carefully saved "The Custom of the Country," and it kept me engrossed the entire way. I finished it in the taxi line at J.F.K., feeling bottomlessly grateful to Edith Wharton. What German authors are you currently reading? I'm reading the extremely funny Thomas Brussig, who unfortunately isn't translated into English. Last year I was reading Karl Kraus for the translations of his work that I'm publishing in the fall. Kraus was Viennese, but his language, of course, was German. Are there particular kinds of stories you're drawn to? Any you steer clear of? I like fiction by writers engaged in trying to make sense of their lives and of the world in which they find themselves, writers who palpably have skin in the game, and this makes me particularly resistant to historical fiction. And yet some of my all-time favorite novels are historical - "The Greenlanders" (Jane Smiley), "The Blue Flower" (Penelope Fitzgerald) and "War and Peace." It took some perseverance to get into "The War of the End of the World," which is about the brutal suppression of a rebellion in late-19th-century Brazil, but once I was into it I was harrowed as I've been by few other novels. The suffering and violence and death in it became, in a sense, my own. I thought it was magnificent. Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend? I guess we shouldn't count Freud, although I have felt helped by him. I also remember feeling helped, at least momentarily, by Harriet Lerner's "Dance of Anger" at a dark moment in my early 30s. It's the rare self-help book that acknowledges the true difficulty of helping the self. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? A copy of "Libra," with a nice inscription, that Don DeLillo sent me in 1989. I must have asked my publisher to send him a finished copy of my first novel; there's no way to explain the gift otherwise. But after spending my 20s working in near-total isolation and revering DeLillo from afar, I couldn't believe that I had something signed to me in his own human hand. At some level, I still can't believe it. What's the best thing about writing a book? The meaning it temporarily lends to my existence. The hardest or least enjoyable part? The years of doubting whether I actually have another story to tell. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? I wouldn't presume to require our current president to read anything, but the Vargas Llosa novel wouldn't have been a bad choice for our previous president, who I suspect could have used some help in imagining the human costs of righteous wars. Nor would "The Flamethrowers" - which, among other things, gives a subtly damning view of a powerful man through the eyes of the ambitious but pliable young woman he sleeps with - have been a bad choice for the president before that. Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child? I grew up going to the public library every week and coming home with stacks of books - my parents weren't readers, didn't have time to be. But my father read books to me every weeknight evening he was home. My mother never read to me, even when he was away on business. I wonder if she recognized that reading was the primary private thing that he and I had together. Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero? As with a lot of writers of my generation, it's "Harriet the Spy." My recollection is that her creator, Louise Fitzhugh, died in her 40s. Did she have any idea how many young people decided to be writers after reading her two books about Harriet? I hope she had at least an inkling. What books are on your coffee table? I admit that I have a coffee table and that there are books on the lower tier of it. Books of bird photographs, catalogs of painters I like (Anne Neely, Lisa Sanditz), a book of photographs of exurban sprawl. I wish I could say that I'd ever seen a guest reach down and pick one up. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: what book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? Most books I pick up I put down without finishing, either because the writing is weak or feels false, or because I sense an absence of skin in the game. I picked up "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" more or less to make sure that it was as overrated as I suspected. I'd always hated the title, and I was sore with Kundera for his public rejection of Dostoyevsky, many years ago. Kundera is a committed rationalist, which is generally a big handicap for a novelist, and it's true that even the dreams in "Unbearable" are given rational readings. But they're still great dreams, and the character who has them, Tereza, is rendered with gorgeous sympathy. I wouldn't have guessed that a love story so well analyzed philosophically could be so moving in the end. If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? I wish I could have been present when Kafka read "The Metamorphosis" aloud to his friends, who couldn't stop laughing. The humor is still there in the text, but I would love to know what he did with his voice. If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be? One of Shakespeare's comic heroines, probably Rosalind, although trying to talk to her in iambic pentameter would be a strain. What are you planning to read next? For the past 20 years or so I've been planning to read the final four volumes of "In Search of Lost Time" next.