Ayaan Hirsi Ali: By the Book

[Valin]

NY Times Sunday Book Review:

The author of “Infidel,” “Nomad” and, most recently, “Heretic” read a lot of romance novels and Jackie Collins growing up: “We didn’t discriminate between good and bad. It is now difficult to imagine that we had so few books.”

Mar. 19 2015

 

What books are currently on your night stand?

 

“The Baron in the Trees,” by Italo Calvino: a delightful and tremendously enjoyable little novel on boyhood defiance. “The Hobbit,” by J. R. R. Tolkien: as compelling as ever. “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen: an incisive analysis of how the age of technology affects everything.

 

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

 

I can’t decide between Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

 

Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?

 

Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, William Langewiesche, Jeffrey Goldberg, Charlie Rose, Megyn Kelly, Asra Nomani and Anderson Cooper.

 

What’s the most interesting or important book to come out recently about the Islamic world?

 

“The Quran Speaks,” by Bahis Sedq: a hugely important book by a scholar of Islam who is, to my mind, the most sophisticated of all the dissidents in the Muslim world. The tragedy is that he has to publish under a pseudonym. He could be the Muslim Luther, if there were only a way to keep him safe.

 

(Snip)