Amy Chua: By the Book

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The law professor and author, most recently, of “Political Tribes” loves comic novels: Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim,” she says, “is possibly my all-time favorite book.”

What books are on your nightstand?

My nightstand is filled with junk, but next to my bed there’s a huge pile of books. They include Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed,” which is exhilaratingly great and somehow manages to be erudite about Russian literature and funny at the same time; Ali Smith’s “Autumn,” which is about an eccentric friendship between an octogenarian and a young girl who share a love of words; Anne Enright’s “The Green Road”; Anthony Kronman’s “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan”; Fredrik Logevall’s “Embers of War”; and Lisa Ko’s “The Leavers.” Oh, and “The Art of Raising a Puppy,” by the Monks of New Skete, which I’m rereading because I’m about to get two new puppies.

Tell us about the last great book you read.

Tara Westover’s “Educated,” a memoir about a girl born into a survivalist family in the Idaho mountains who was not allowed to go to school and spent her days foraging for metal in a junkyard while trying to avoid the catalytic converters hurled at her by her fanatic, anti-government father. She somehow breaks free of the violence and emotional prison of her family and, against all odds, ends up getting a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. The book, which will be published on Feb. 20, is heart-wrenching. But it’s also a beautiful testament to the power of education to open eyes and change lives.

What’s the best book you’ve read about the law? Any book in particular you like teaching to your law students?

James Forman Jr.’s “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” is brilliant and jarring. If everyone in America read it, maybe our country could start to heal. “Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, is another spectacular law-related book, built around the Supreme Court forced-sterilization case, Buck v. Bell. As for my students, I teach Contracts, and I always have them read parts of both Charles Fried’s “Contract as Promise” and Patricia J. Williams’s “The Alchemy of Race and Rights,” to give them two totally different moral perspectives. Williams’s book is a revelation — she has her great-great grandmother’s slave contract — and it always provokes intense, but non-knee-jerk class discussions.

You wrote a memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” that touched on many issues around parenthood. What are your favorite books on child rearing?

I never read any child rearing books when I was raising my daughters; maybe that was my problem! I actually didn’t intend for “Battle Hymn” to be a parenting book either. I had totally different hopes for the book. I’ve always loved books with wacky unreliable narrators. Believe it or not, my models for “Battle Hymn” were “Pale Fire,” by Vladimir Nabokov; “Zeno’s Conscience,” by Italo Svevo; and “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole. Also Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” which, come to think of it, is a child-rearing book of sorts.

Which books do you think best capture the current social and political moment in America?

Well, I think the obvious answer is, on the one hand, books like J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash” and, on the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power.” But I actually think many of the main dynamics roiling our society today were captured decades ago, by books like Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” about the media’s damaging effect on public discourse, Paul Fussell’s 1983 “Class,” Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and Walter Lippmann’s 1922 “Public Opinion,” which talks about how out of touch America’s cosmopolitan elites are with ordinary Americans.

Which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?

I love classics. Some of my favorites are Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Salammbô,” James’s “The Golden Bowl” and Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” “Dream of the Red Chamber,” by Cao Xueqin, is also amazing. It took me a while (and at least five false starts) to get into it, but I ended up loving Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” made a big impact on me — how ingenious to write a book whose chapters you could read in two different orders.

Which genres are you drawn to and which do you avoid?

This is so embarrassing, but I can’t read poetry. Try as I might, and I really have tried, I just don’t get poems. I love novels and short stories, but for some reason poetry evades me. I consider it a deep moral failing in myself, especially because my husband and daughters are avid poetry lovers. A good friend gave me Edward Hirsch’s “How To Read a Poem,” which I read and still have on my shelf, but it didn’t work. Also, I’m not a fan of rambling books about traveling across the country while experimenting with psychedelic drugs. I need a plot.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night?

I read books related to my work in the morning, when I have my best concentration, and books for fun at night. I always read paper books — I don’t even know how to use Kindle.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Maybe all the funny books I have, starting with Laurence Sterne’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” which starts off with the narrator as a homunculus (sperm) at the moment of his ill-conceived conception. Kingsley Amis’s academic satire “Lucky Jim” is possibly my all-time favorite book. I still occasionally burst out laughing just thinking of the protagonist’s nemesis Bertrand Welch, a pompous pseudo-intellectual who wears a beret and says “You sam” — a stretched out version of “You see.” More recently, David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” B. J. Novak’s “One More Thing,” and Ali Wentworth’s “Happily Ali After” all had me on the floor.

Which books were you most eager to introduce to your children? And which books have they introduced to you?

Some of my own childhood favorites like Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings,” Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” Crockett Johnson’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon” and Esphyr Slobodkina’s “Caps for Sale.” Then, as the girls got older, “Caddie Woodlawn,” “Black Beauty,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” and “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” My husband was in charge of reading Tolkien, “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Lloyd Alexander’s “The Chronicles of Prydain” with my daughters, and it was through the three of them that I got introduced to science fiction books like “Dune.”

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

A 2007 book called “Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall.” It argued that, relative to the societies around them, all of history’s greatest powers were strikingly pluralistic and tolerant on their rise to power, and that in every case their decline coincided with a stark turn to intolerance and xenophobia. If only it had come out a decade later! But I’m an optimist. As I explore in my new book, “Political Tribes,” I think America has self-correction mechanisms built into our identity and our institutions.

Who would you want to write your life story?

My daughters, Sophia and Lulu, jointly. Or maybe Elif Batuman, who I think is supersmart and really funny. I love her idiosyncratic way of looking at things. She’s the daughter of Turkish immigrants — and studied violin at the Manhattan School of Music — so I think she’d relate. Also, she seems like a generous spirit, and I could definitely use that!

And if you could ghostwrite someone else’s?

Arguably, I already did that.

What do you plan to read next?

“Turtles All the Way Down,” by John Green, and “The House of Government,” by Yuri Slezkine.