Jonathan Franzen admits he could never got more than 50 pages into "Moby-Dick". Source: Supplied US AUTHOR Jonathan Franzen has revealed the books he most loves and loathes, hating on some of the world's most celebrated stories.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the writer behind The Corrections admits to lying about having read Herman Melville’s classic, Moby-Dick. Despite "multiple attempts" at tacking the dense novel, he says he never made it past page 50.
Franzen also takes a swipe at J.D. Salinger, the popular author who penned Catcher in the Rye.
"Salinger’s fiction seems to me a slender reed on which to hang the weight of world-changing genius that’s currently being ascribed to him," Franzen says.
On a more positive note, he says Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial are two books that helped cement him as a writer.
"What the two have in common is main characters who are at once sympathetic and morally dubious," he says.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End was the best book Franzen read for school, and he says he has re-read many times The Lord of the Rings, The Great Gatsby and Desperate Characters.
He also reveals a childhood love for “anything talking or thinking animals”, including A.A. Milne, the Narnia novels, Doctor Doolittle, Wind in the Willows and the Peanuts comic strip.
"This seems a little strange now, given that I was afraid of dogs and that my parents didn’t let me have any pets except for hamsters and turtles, which I didn’t love, and which were always dying on me."
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