Guess What Ronan Farrow’s Favorite Books Are
Ronan Farrow has had probably the best year any journalist could have, and now he’s topped it off with a Pulitzer Prize. Thankfully, Entertainment Weekly caught up with him to share the books which have defined his life.
“I loved Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series as a kid, and then again as a (nerdy) adult, for its smart slice of alternate history and its cynical views on authority and adulthood. Also there’s a polar bear fight scene,” Ronan said to EW.
Not surprisingly, he’s also a C.S. Lewis fan: “I don’t know that there’s a single book. There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet that has stuck with me. An academic is kidnapped and taken to Mars. The aliens there are sentient otters and find us confusing. They don’t have the concept of regret, because they think it’s silly to draw conclusions about the meaning of a moment before you see how it echoes over a lifetime. One says, ‘When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then — that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.’ The important thing is when a person ‘remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.’”
Additionally, “Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution, which Mike Nichols, shortly before his death, told me was the funniest book ever written. Also I re-read Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 a few months ago, which is funny as hell.”
He added, “Maybe Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. I wish I had his grasp of obscure history or weird sex or surprising sentence structure, but who does?” Read more at EW.