Here is a brief interview of Garrison Keillor that was featured in The New York Times. The host of A Prairie Home Companion and the author, most recently, of The Keillor Reader collects hymnals, phrase books and tales of heroic collies. And “I’m a connoisseur of bad poetry of the elegiac variety.” To check out other resources and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
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What are the best books about Minnesota?
Ecclesiastes tells you all you need to know about Minnesota. “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” You can say that again. “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor bread to the wise nor riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” That’s got Minnesota down to a T. You run fast and you trip on a gopher hole, you are heavily armed and well trained and you shoot yourself in the foot, you’re so smart you go broke. “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: There is nothing new under the sun.” This is the sum and substance of the prevailing philosophy in my state. The optimists among us are either running for public office or on strong medications; the rest of us are skeptical.
What inspired you to open your own independent bookstore in St. Paul?
The neighborhood bookstore shut down, and that left a gap in the lives of a lot of people — without it, they had to go to Minneapolis to buy books, and that makes no sense — Minneapolis is where you go to see documentary films or lectures on urban planning or dances with titles like “Dimensions of Being”; it’s not where you go for books — so I felt obliged. I’ve loved books since I was a kid, loved to hold them, smell the ink, feel the heft of the book.
What’s the best thing about being in the bookselling business? The worst?
The best thing is that the employees are really, really nice to you; the worst thing is that you do not get a 10 percent discount when you buy books. I don’t know why. It was explained to me once, and I didn’t understand. I mean, I’m the owner, right? But no, that’s not how it’s done.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?
I hope you wouldn’t be surprised by my collection of hymnals or commentaries on Scripture, but you might be surprised by the number of phrase books, the kind that tell you how to say “I have a toothache” in six languages. I’m a connoisseur of bad poetry of the elegiac variety. I am a sucker for lexicons and thesauruses. I collect novels about heroic collies who rescue their owners, rescues that may involve ocean voyages or changing planes in Chicago.
What do you like to read when procrastinating?
Procrastination is available at your fingertips, the whole vast www world. Cat videos, vicious gossip about pop stars, survivalist blogs, right-wing paranoia, it’s all there. The Internet brought the barroom, the porn shop, the fleabag hotel lobby and the men’s locker room into every American home, and you can now hang out with ne’er-do-wells to your heart’s content without anybody knowing about it.
What do you like to read right before bed?
If I read right before bed, I’d stay up too late. Right before bed I imagine myself being honored as the oldest pitcher in major league ball, the only man to take the mound at the age of 71, his knuckleball feared by one and all. There are speeches, and a standing O, and I wave to the crowd and go into the dugout and go to sleep.
Whom do you consider your literary heroes?
John Updike for his vast ambition and the Lutheran diligence that realized it. Edward Hoagland for his style and bravery and love of the world. May Swenson, again for bravery, independence, also wit. A. J. Liebling and Roy Blount Jr. as reporters who wrote literature: You can read them over and over and over. P. G. Wodehouse for sheer elegance and invention. Robert Bly, a wonderful poet into his 80s, a great old troublemaker.
What kind of reader were you as a child? And what were your favorite childhood books?
I was slow to read, but once on track I read nonstop. Books were respected in our home, and if you sat holding one, Mother was less likely to send you out to weed the carrots or shovel the driveway. This encouraged serious reading. I was reading Lewis and Fitzgerald quite early, wanting to be considered precocious, but my favorites were Little Britches, by Ralph Moody, about a Colorado boy whose best friends are cowboys, and Runaway Home, by Elizabeth Coatsworth, about a family that travels by trailer around the country, both books that I could imagine myself as a character in, fantasies of male friendship and of the peripatetic life. (I learned “peripatetic” when I was in sixth grade and was eager to use it in conversation, along with “antithesis” and “miasma” and “pejorative” and words of that ilk.)
You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich. With three women, you know they will carry the conversation completely, no need for me to say a word, which is exactly how I like it. I love to hear women talk. I’ll make the salad, the seafood risotto, the rhubarb crisp, and clear the dishes, pour the wine, serve the coffee, and sit and smile. Afterward I’ll make it into a novella.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, is pretty dreadful, and it inspired a whole lot of bad books about sensitive adolescent males needing to flee the philistines in their hometowns. As for putting books down without finishing them, I do that all the time. When you pass 70, you are no longer obligated to finish what you’ve started, not a book, not a meal, not even a sentence.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Ulysses — how many do you want me to name? — the Aeneid, David Copperfield, Remembrance of Things Past — can I stop now? I read War and Peace and liked it and also Crime and Punishment. And also For Whom the Sun Rises.
What do you plan to read next?
Today’s Times, of course.