When it comes to books, Jonathan Franzen doesn’t need Oprah’s Book Club to pick “em.
Franzen – who dared question Winfrey’s seal of approval on his award-winning novel, “The Corrections” – is a self-described “serious obsessive reader” who needs no direction at all. On Friday, he’ll join Parker Posey, Sarah Vowell and others in a reading from “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America” at The New School. (He wrote about New York State.)
“I revisit my favorite books over and over,” he tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman. “I reread “The Great Gatsby’ every couple of years.”
Here’s what else is on his library of favorites.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
You can’t simply say Nabokov was talented. He produced, out of the dirtiest material, the most delightful, sympathetic, heartbreaking, hilarious document. Books like that you can’t learn anything from, because it seems as if it must have been miraculous, even to him, that it came together as well as did.
The Laughing Policeman
by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
It was made into a terrible movie with Walter Matthau – terrible! – but it’s a book I reread with affection every few years. They arguably invented the genre of the police procedural. When I have a cold and need something to comfort myself, I read this. If you have a cold, misery really does love company.
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead
It’s the masterpiece by [an] Australian-born writer who spent five years in the United States in the ’40s. Stead gave us, in one novel, more than what a handful of novelists did in their whole careers: three unique characters in one book.
Peanuts
by Charles M. Schulz
I didn’t get the daily strip – it was in the newspaper my parents didn’t get – so my only access to Peanuts was these three hardcover collections that came out in the 1960s, which I got on three different Christmases. I read them more like novels, because I was reading a bunch of strips all at once. It was my earliest exposure to what I’d call great literature – it’s where I learned what a character could be.