Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director of PEN America, on her life as a reader

What books are on your bedside table?

Charlotte Lydia Riley’s The Free Speech Wars. She and I have agreed to write for a series of short books from Penguin Random House UK, offering opposing views on current issues. Our book will address the question, “Is free speech in danger?” (You can guess which side I’m on). I’m dying to read Salman Rushdie’s Knife and have taken it on a couple of short trips, but I haven’t committed to it emotionally yet. And Sarah Lewis’ The Unseen Truth, out in September, is a compelling account of the visual lenses through which we see and understand race, and through which we don’t see and understand it.

Given the difficult situation writers are currently living in, do you find it difficult to read simply for pleasure?

Frankly, yes. We are dealing with the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas, which has devastating consequences for all concerned, including writers. In Ukraine, writers are fighting on the front lines, and our colleagues at PEN Ukraine are using books and literature to feed an embattled nation. Our main work is representing individual writers who are threatened, imprisoned, and sometimes tortured or killed because of their opinions, and that number is growing. Sometimes it’s hard to sleep because of it.

What type of reader were you as a child? Which children’s books and authors remain in your memory the most?

My breakthrough was reading Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur, when I first realized I could read for myself. It was a steep climb from there, and by second grade I was concentrating on paperback romances that I couldn’t possibly understand. I still have a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables that my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dorros, gave me as a prize, with the inscription, “Suzanne, I know you wanted a romance, but this is a timeless story that I hope you enjoy.” (I eventually did, after I got over my initial annoyance at being told what to read.)

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

A novel has to immerse you, and a world has to come to life by taking up places I’ve been or can imagine. I set Elizabeth Strout’s books near a summer camp in Maine where I was a counselor. My setting for Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West was Hong Kong. I can conjure up the image of the cabins in the woods at Camp David that came to mind when I read Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September. However, it’s hard to immerse yourself in another geography and world when you’re only reading a few pages a night. It takes me a while for the landscape of the book to sink into my brain, so my ideal reading experience is a beach or a Balinese bed by the pool, where I can change positions throughout the day to avoid sunburn while I lose myself in another world.