Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

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

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

My name is Michael Silverblatt.

Today, my guest is El Doctor O.

The occasion that brings him to my city, Los Angeles,

is the soon-to-open musical adaptation of his novel,

the first famous of his novels, Ragtime.

And the pleasure is of having the opportunity to reread it

because 20 years ago, when it was published in 1975, like many other people, alerted to it by its publication

in several chapters in the wonderful literary review, the New American Review, we had read two

crucial chapters and no one could wait. I mean, so many people read that book the day it came out.

I remember waiting at the bookstore for it the way one would wait for a Beatles album in those days.

And so to read it now, the book thrusts forward very preciously details that I'd forgotten from my first reading.

And I wondered, what is your relationship to your own prior work?

Do you read it with surprise?

Well, eventually you stop reading it shortly after it's published, at least I do.

And then I find that as some time elapses, I'll have some curiosity about the book,

and I'll open it at any page at all and start to read it.

But I'll seldom read more than three or four pages because I either will find myself

editing them or if I'm quite caught up in them, I'll close the book because I don't want to reach a page that I'll start

...