Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for you are the only animal

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, from Santa Monica, California, from KCRW.

I'm Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. Today my guest is Alan Kurzweil.

He's the author of two interrelated novels, the more recent of them, is the grand complication.

It's published by Hyperion Books. The earlier book was a case of curiosity.

And they are both, in a sense, about cases, the same case.

And I wonder what was it that brought you back to the scene of the crime?

I was foolish enough when asked by a journalist following the publication of my first book,

what I might do as a follow-up.

And as a throwaway line, I said that since the first book narrated the life of an 18th century engineer

via a collection of objects enclosed under glass.

And since this case of curiosities had nine of the ten compartments filled, I said,

maybe I'll spend two or three years trying to figure out what that final empty compartment contained.

And the net result of that one-liner is that I was plagued for the next

10 years by that very question. The tone of the books are very different. In a certain way, a case of

curiosity said, as it was in the 18th century, had the diction of an 18th century novel. The new one is much more reader-friendly in a certain way. Did you want to do a book that would not involve the confection of an alternate rhetoric?

Yes. The short answer is yes. The longer answer requires a bit of an explanation of the process that went into the writing of the first book. When I wrote a case of curiosities, I had a far more grand and complicated structure for it. I had interleaved a number of contemporary

repudiation of that story. When I ended up editing the book, I decided in the penultimate

...