Salman Rushdie’s fighting a deadline: He has just one month to finish his second children’s book in time for his son’s 11th birthday.
“I wrote my first children’s book, ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories,’ for my eldest son when he was 11, and now [Milan] insists on having his own book,” he tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman — though he won’t reveal its title.
“I’m very superstitious about writing,” says the knighted author of “Midnight’s Children,” “The Satanic Verses,” “The Enchantress of Florence” and many more. This week, the famous survivor of a fatwa chairs the fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival. Here are four of his favorite books.
Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
I think anyone trying to write books for children thinks of “Alice” as being a great touchstone. Both “Alice” and “Through the Looking Glass” can be read in two different ways — children can delight in them as children, and adults as adults.
The Thousand and One Nights
by Anonymous
Those were the first stories I heard, the bedtime stories my father would tell me. It’s liberating to the imagination, those winged horses and flying carpets, magic and curses . . . It tells you that you can use fantastic elements and still be truthful of human nature.
Ulysses
by James Joyce
The edition I have is the one Random House published immediately after the ban was lifted in the United States, but that’s not why it’s on my list. When I was young and thinking of becoming a writer, that was the book that blew my mind. People talk about its difficulty, but what they don’t say is how funny it is. I go back and read it every 10 years.
The Code of the Woosters
by P.G. Wodehouse
When I was growing up in India, the most beloved English-language writers were Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. I read industrial-size quantities of both. If I stretch myself, I can probably still recite, from memory, passages from “The Code of the Woosters.”