Chris Bohjalian Can Read for Hours in the Bath
Credit.Jillian Tamaki
April 22, 2021
“I also loved to read in swimming pools, pre-Covid, when vacations were a thing,” says the novelist, whose latest book is “Hour of the Witch.”
What books are on your night stand?
I’m old school and don’t read on a tablet, and so my night stand is a Jenga tower of galleys and manuscripts for books that won’t be published for months. It’s terrifying. One night, it’s going to collapse and kill me in my sleep. There are always at least one or two books that are research for whatever novel I’m writing, which means in this case I have a book about skydiving and a book about the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in Adana, Turkey, in 1909. But three novels were recently published that I’d been looking forward to, and so amid the unstable skyscraper are Carol Edgarian’s “Vera”; Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”; and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed.”