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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have, as my guest, someone who's been a guest many times, Jane Smiley,

and she's written a book called Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

It's a critical book. It's more or less in three sections,

a history of the novel itself, a kind of guide to how you can write a novel, followed by the

reading of 100 novels over a period, I think, of three years. And it's very interesting because I think, you know, what's betrayed in this book is that

Jane Smiley loves novels as much as anyone as much as I do, and I love novels as much

as anyone.

And yet we come from different sides of the fence as far as novels go.

I love the miraculous and the unreal, the novel that transports. In other words, I read to

escape from life. And Jane read in order to understand people more deeply. And I was trying to

escape the people I was understanding

all too well, and yet we both love novels.

You know, I think that often with children who become novelists, they do read to escape.

I read the bobsy twins. I didn't read fantasy, but I read the bobsy twins and Nancy Drew. And I found that

that was just as good escape fiction as anything else, you know, because my desire as a child,

I didn't have brothers and sisters and I wished I did. So if I could have had a twin, a twin plus

...