Sunday, January 13, 2008

What is Nick McDonell reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nick McDonell, author of the novels Twelve and The Third Brother.

Alex de Waal, who taught McDonell at Harvard and is a recent contributor to Writers Read, told me that McDonell was with him "in Darfur in November... reading E.M. Forster's Passage to India in between [their] sojourns in the Arab nomads' encampments."

I asked McDonell about what he was reading in Africa and recently. His reply in part:
I was indeed reading A Passage to India out there, but left it in the hands of one Lt. Col. Moto on a dusty army base, and thus haven't finished it. I think the first half, at least, is some of the best writing I have ever read, fiction or non, about the colonial enterprise. And funny too, great awkward stuff with old British ladies accidentally wandering into Mosques and so on. [read on]
Read more about McDonell's novels Twelve and The Third Brother at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Nick McDonell.

--Marshal Zeringue