The Novel That Led Abraham Verghese to a Medical Career
What books are on your night stand?
The stack reflects the overlapping compartments of my life: Daniel Mason’s “North Woods” (in galley form); “Images of Memorable Cases: 50 Years at the Bedside,” by Herbert L. Fred and Hendrik A. van Dijk; “The Best Strangers in the World,” by Ari Shapiro; “The Passenger,” by Cormac McCarthy; and at the bottom, the two volumes of “Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine,” a book that I’ve had a love affair with ever since I encountered the seventh edition in 1974. My ambition is always to read it cover to cover before the next edition, but for the last five editions I haven’t come close. In my defense, it’s 4,384 pages.
What’s the last great book you read?
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. I’m drawn to big epic novels, and this was all that at over 800 pages (but still, a pamphlet compared to “Harrison’s”).
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
I had only sampled Saul Bellow (“Humboldt’s Gift”) when I was in my 20s. I picked up “The Adventures of Augie March” during the darkest days of the Covid pandemic. I found it stunning. It left me no choice but to systematically read everything of his. I had a similar reaction to “The Brothers Karamazov,” another recent read; it made me go back to and better appreciate “Crime and Punishment” and to commit to read all of Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre. I think editors today would take a red pen to Dostoyevsky’s long digressions, but to me those are integral to his charm.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Ideal would be on a houseboat in Kerala, motoring down the backwaters with my own cook and boatman and sipping toddy; or else under an umbrella at some warm beach while digitally disconnected. But I’ll settle for an uninterrupted hour or two wherever I can find it, and that’s typically late at night, or often on a plane. During the height of the Covid pandemic (whose only silver lining was what it did for reading and for baking sourdough bread), I was biking or walking to work and I got into audiobooks. I could seamlessly pick up where I left off on the physical page the previous night. Listening to a book has made me even more attuned to the sound of what I put on the page. It led me to audition for narrating the audiobook of “The Covenant of Water.” Happily, I got the role. (It’s harder than most people realize: One has to perform the book and convey who is speaking using pitch, tone and accent but without overdoing it. Five hours a day for two and a half weeks and communicating by sign language in the evenings to restore the voice.)
Source: The New York Times
