thanks again and best wishes. >> guest: thank you for you seice and exampleor all of us. >> host: i have enjoyed it. ..

>> guest: she was a cocktail waitress, among other jobs, 21, 22 years old in oklahoma who was murdered i december of 1981. whapeton murdered ia very, very brutal episodes, and it took the police in adel five years to solve her crime or they thought they saw that. they got the wro guys, and they convicted the wrong guys and sent them to prison, sent one to death row. ron volumes and went to death row. he had never met her. and he spent 11 years in prison and was exonerated tenears ago, 1999, almost ten years

exactly what he spent a total of 12 years in prison for the murder of deborah cter and had never met her. >> host: who was ron williamson? >> guest: ron williamson was the man i had never met, never heard of him. he was one of the first big notorious dna exoneration is in the late 90's. amendment hymn when i read his obituary, so i never got to see him obviously. but he was a character. when he would younger, many people in his small corner of oklahoma thought ron was the next mickeyantle and ron certainly thought so. he had an nice ego, and he was the second round draft pick in 1972 for the oakland a's and when not to seekajor league glory and thought he was going to make it.

he never came close. had a bunch of injuries, it didn't take care of himself, started drinking and drugging and a prettyild lifestyle. crashed and burned in the minor leagues burkett when he was 25 or 26 years old he began showing the first signs of some type of the mental illness that was eventually diagnosed as being bipolar. all the wheels came off for ron williams. he did not help himself. there was a lot of self medicating with booze and drugs, and in 1986 or 87, he was arrested for the murder of deborah carter, again a woman he had never met. host: why did you cho this story to be your only work of nonfiction? >> guest: 21 novels and one

book of nonfiction. i am not trained as a journalist. i never thought about it. i am a lawyer and i'm a novelist. that is the way i think. at the same time i am always lookingor good stories. i am eyes on the prowl forood stories. i never thought it would be a real one. i read of ron's obituary in "the new york times" early december of 2004. >> host: nobody star d2 it? >> guest: stumbled across the. opened the paper one day and there was his obituary and tre was a picture of him in oklahoma of the 1899 the day he was exonerated, the sa corchoran for which she had been convicted and sent off to die. 12 years later he was in the courtrm. this is where the pho was taken and he and i were the same age, the same race, religion, the same part of the world. he gw up in a small town in oklahomand i grew up in a small town in arkansas, i

louisiana. a lot of similarities and i thought how can this guy go to death rog for 11 years and come within five days of being executed? i mean, he was the dead man. oklahoma was about to stratham in and lethally inject him. they had it all planned ande had given up. he was insane. nobody cared about that except his family. this is, it was too good. was the baseball engel. i dreamed of playing major league baseball just like every kion my street t the fact it ron was the second round draft pick i know how good you have to be to be drafted, but to be picked the number one player out of the state of oklahoma in the 1972raft. i knew he had to be real good. anyway all the pieces cam togeth. it was too good of the story and once i got into it, i realized i

couldn't fictionalize i i ought abt it at first, because i didn't want to do all the work, i didn't want to d while the rearch but i also knew nobodyould believe the story. no one would believe this if i wrote it as a nel. that is like bernie madoff. if he wrote that as an awful no one is going to believe it. you couldn't sell three copies. it is too good. subradislav often happens with the stories that are just too rich. you really, you can't use them, you can't stdal them a novelist. you can do the non-fiction route and that is what i chose with "the innocent man." >> host: so you go from reading d.o. bit to what? how did it become this book? >> guest: i had no idea what i s getting into when i started. although i loved t story from day one. i still love the story. as i have got into the rld of

wrongful convictions, i have realized that there are a lot of exonorees, 235 now from the innocent project in new york and around the country. that is 235 fantaics tories just from a human drama and tragedy perspective. how can our system, the system that we all believe then especially as lawyers, especially as a former criminal lawyer who never dealt with their wrongf conviction. if you thi this is the best system in e world, how can you explain to hundred and 35 exoneration and that is the tip of the iceberg. how can you explain the fact that we have sent 130 men to death row to be executed. i went to see them walk away because th weren't guilty or did not get a fair trial. it is a terribleystem. it has got some terrible

problems that have to be fixed. an once i got into it, once i got into this story i realized what the message could be, just by telling the story of this man who was almost killed, was almost a victim of thisery flawed death penalty system we have. on. i could write a book about every exoneration, and there are a lot of books about the exonorees now. a lot of t guys will write their stories and they are all fascinating. they have all t elements that make a great nel, especially a lot of tragedy and heartbreak. it is good stuff when you write books. >> host: so you read the obuary, you travel to oklahoma. the start to research the case? what do u do? >> gue: ronald had two sisters, and that's in tulsa,

oklahoma and renee close to dallas. i called both of these ladies and convince them that i was serious and-- >> host: what did they say? >> guest: they thought i was joking. >> host: did they know who you were? >> guest: oh yeah, they were both big readers and another story, became a huge reader on death row and we will talk aut that in a minute if you want to but i never heard him say he read my books on death row. he loved stephen king, he loved tom clancy, he loved john einbeck and he read serious novels. he rea everything he could get. i talked to h two sisters and i said, this is what i want to do. i want exclusive rights to this story. there were other people circling. there had been movie producers, tv producers have been her

around. there had been rumorabout the book. again it is such a great story and i wanted to go in fact, lockett up. i wanted exclusive rights to eir story and access to all the stuff being fahmy moves to duke-- family photograph albums. i have inslee got erything. so iowan of the exclusive right to get all i could out of these people and they said fine, so we struck a deal and we all felt comfortable with that. i took offo loc, and-- oklahoman end matsen great friends, the attorney for ron williamson, still a great friend of mine, still working on some of the okloma cases sort of took me around and introduce me to the judges and a lot of thelayers involved in the story. there tons of documents, trialed transcripts, have got ron's

prison records, fou boxes of ron's ily notes that they took on him in @rison. disciplinary reports, all the documents philip a whole room. and that is how the book came. once i had all of this that i dn't knowhat to do with it. and i met theamily of debbie carter, the victim, her mom, her niece. they became friends, and we reached the level where we could trt each other. i talked to, i talked to most of the players. i didn't talk to all of them. i didn't really spend any time with the cops who were involved in the investigation because i knew what they were going to say because ey have already said it und oath in the trial and i had their trial testimony under oath. i had their cil court depositions under oath si have

them locked in. i have hundreds of pages of there, of what they had already said under oath so i didn't have to chase them down. anyway, it was a whole research and investigative process that-- >> host: was it new to you? >> guest: it was all new and i really struggled with the issues that i guess journalist faced every day. if you have to a sky source who elling you a great story, and will swear to it, but you don't trust your source, and you can't verify it elsewhere, what do you do? u don't use the story, as much as you want to. i was continually cfronted with issues like that. again questions that journalist deal with all the time. i felt like there would be, i knew the book would not be well

received by the people i was writing about, the procutor, the police,aybe other folks in the system so i wanted to be, wanted to be accurate, extremely accurate when i talked about them. so, that increased the level of research, the level of scrutiny that the book went through by editors and attorneys afterwards, so we were very carel. but it was a process that took 18 months, which for me is a long time. i write a novel iabout six months, which sounds fest bu i mean if you start writing freer four or five pages a day, over five or six months, you've got a lot of pages and that is kind of the way i wopk. the notion of having to just verify every sentence, have a

source was pretty tedious tour i would do it again. >> host: why was it importt for you to establish what oklahoma is like hand what some of the characters, the true life characters look like, why is the important? >> guest: i grew up in towns like ada, small towns, friendly people, everybody knows everybod ada 15,000 people with the college was a little bit bigger than a lot of towns i grew up then b still i knew, knew the area i felt like. i had never been to ada before but it was sorof the way i grew up. every night have the town is that the little league ballpark and you listen to the cardinals on the radio, and that was just the way i grew up and it was the way i prtced law for ten years. very much a small town hustler looking for clients, looking for

a way to pay the orhead and hope to gea big case. that is the wa it was when i was a lawyer and that is the way it is r most lawyers i think in ada, so i felt very much at home in at environment. i amot a big city guy. obviously that is not where want to stay, not whe i wanto be so i uerstood it and i enders dead the work ethic, the christian influence, the sort of harshness of my the religions for the denominations. ron was pentecostal. i am not, but i understood how he was raised. >> host: why is that important to the reader? >> guest: well, you have to put your reader in that place. you have got to come you go to sigir reader away to come other place he or she has never been

before. and to me that is good story telling. that is what i always try to do. i wanted to really capture the feeling of the small town and also in small towns when there is a murder people want justice. they want it fast. they want somebod else to die for it. that is small town america, especially in this part of the world, oklahoma, arkansas and mississippi where i grew up. they love the death penalty, a they want it used more often. they wanteused, those people are frustrated, those pegple, e majity ofhe people in the south in the southwest, midwest, small-town america, they want the death penty used more often. they are frustrated by the fact that these guys stay on death row for 10 or 15 years as the apals drag gn. they want people executed.

where here in virginia. virginia ranks behind only taxes in the number of people executed so this is an execution state. this is a death happy state. that is the way the majority of people think around here. so, you know i was trying to that environment and those people. it has always been a paradox to me how people who are so stridently moralistic and ristian can so passionately love the death penalty. i have never understood that, because that is not wha christ taught. but, anyway, i wanteto st of bring that into the book to try to expla tohe reader how these verdicts have been haned so, people have such respect for

the authorities so when you have policemen testifying, the jurors believe it. when you have experts from the state crime b come in and testify and match-u hair and fingerprints and all of that, blood, the jurors believe that. even though these guys are wrong, hair analysis is junk science. it haseen proven many times in their hundreds of people right now in prison because of hair analysis. it is junk science. what hair analysts from the state crime lab have been testifying with the great deal of certainty in virtually every state in this country for a lon time. anyway, i wanted to show how trials happen. pele say, how do these convictions happen, these wrongful convictions? suddenly as the country, as a culture, as a society where

starting to question things after 230 high profile in me regions, these guys walk out of prison after 20 years and they were innocent. we have got to question something. the police, the prosecutors, the perts, the junk science, the false confessions, l the things that go intohis package-hodo you get a wrongfulonction? it is in "the innocent man." it is a checklist. virtually everything except for wrongful aideed, identification, wrongful eyewitness id brit all the other factors that go into th wrongful condition-- conviction are in "the innocent man." so i just wanted to go through and what the reader through. i did not create any of this stuff. i had to find it andrrange it in a readable fashion and t in a good dose of storytellin. striving for accuracy. i can defend everything in

there, but i want the book to shock people. i want the book to inth seriate readers. it is done a pretty good job of that. >> host: not to give away everything in "the innocent man," but were lies told on the stand? >> guest: repeatey. they ud bunch of snitches, the old jailhouse snitch routine, which is, which is another rich source for wrongful convictions, and there were several snitches, who were prisoners themselves, who the cops would drag out of every deal, in return for so testimony. he confessed to me, he told me

all about-- that kind of stuff, typicl snitch testimony, which islmost always bogus. when they arrested ron, when they finally got the warrant for his arrest, they ha a bogus fingerprint analysis, okay, that s shaky but using that, that was enough to get him the arrest warrant. once they got roin jail, that is when they built their case against him in jail. he supposedly said something to one of the prison guards. he supposedly confessed to another one. that got testifi so that is how they build the case against fawn in a trial. these people testified. he told me ts. all in jail, he said you know, whatever but that is how the

line happened. there were a lot of lights. >> ht: aquarius dennis brits today? >> guest: dennis fritlives in kansas city and he is about to celebrate ten years of freedom. on april the 15th, which is st a few weeks away. and, then this is one of the lucky guys. most of these exonorees, once they get over the euphoria of walking out of prison, that is why they are always smiling when they walk out after 20 years, 15 years, ten years. reality sets in in most of them are released without a dime, thout a support network, without any kind of plan. society wants them to go away and shut up. there is never an apology. nobody has the guts to say they wererong. so these guys a kind of casout

and left, left to survive. and a lot of them have obviously a very difficult time. dennis when three period of difficulty when he got out. he and ron had some very, very good lawyers, barry-- barry scheck and peter neufeld and new york, but also mark beared and other lawyers in oklahom they put togetr thi really strong civilase iwhich they went back in sued the cops, sued the prosecutor, sued the state crime lab. run syd the prison system and they sued a lot of people. and they filed a lawsuit a year after they were out. it went through an extensive period of discovery and eventually was settled. the terms were undisclosed. i mean, it was locked up by a

federal court order so iever pride. i do know that the sub13 newspaper reporters, they got 5 million bucks. i don't know at is accurate but anyway, dennis and ron got some money in dennis was smart with his. he invest it wisely. he got some professional help. he has put hisife back together and then the spends a lot of time networking with the innocence project, speaking around the country. he came within one vote of getting the death penalty, his vo was 11-1 to give dennis death. because of that he did not go to death row, he went to the general population and survive for 11 years but you go through that and you can get some speech is. peopleike to listen to you. it is fascinating material. >> host: he had quoted backs dori also, his wife murdered on

christmas day prior to this. >> guest: several years before this his wife was shot in the head by some crazy kid next door and when dennis was working. he was out of town that day. his small dahter who was in the room with her mom when she died, and he survived that. he could not worfor a while. he was ting to raise his daughter in just a terrible story. dennis the finished college. he was the junior high school science teacher, had a decent job. he was not from ada. dennis was from kansas city but he had found his way to oklahoma and he was trying to put his life back together. dennis was arrested, odennis was suspected becausehe cots in their brilliance, right f e bat, the murder scene was so grisly, they said tw people h to do this. it had to be a two-man job.

there was no proof whatsoever. it was just a hunch and that was what, that is how a lot of wrongful convictions start. ese cops get a hunch. they know it all. they have been around, they have gothe experience. degette hunch for something. ture three, whatever. and then it pu blinders on and get locked into this tunnel vision for their rights and they are going to prove they are right. the cops in this case right off the bat, it is so violent, the crime scene it had to be too many jobs a they pursued this theory with no proof and once they locked in on ron williamson , they realized ron did not have any friends in town or very few friends. the only person he was hanging the ground with was dennis fritz and that was their theory, that was their lincoln that is how dennis got sucked into all of this and then when dennis gotten

jail, he was arrested, put dennis in jail and suddenly there were snitches. who heard dennis confess or heard dennis say this and they got all of these ditches and put them on the witness stand under oath and these people told the jury and that is how dennisot convicted. no physical proof, no vile prove. they had a state crime lab expert who mated some of dennis' hair and some of iran's hair to some scalp hair and hair found at the crime scene. was aatch. totally disprove and later by dna, but any way that is how they got denni convicted. >> host: we will leave the conclusion to people who want to read the book. mr. grisham you said that you would not want to do this again. take on and nfiction projec

like this. is that definitive? >> guest: no, no. it could happen tomorrow. if i see the right story. i have got the next two books sort of planned. >> host: novels. >> guest: i am finishing a collection of short stories. some of the stories i have been playing around with for 15 years and they a finally getting wrapped up. is going to be a short story collection published probably i october by doubleday and that is the nex project. but the next legal thriller is already kind of taking shape, so if i saw a great idea in the newspaper in the obituary seion tomrow, i would probably file it away and i might pursue it, but i would be sort of hesitant to jump into it

right now. ron's otuary was, the timing, when i sought the timing was really good because it was dember and i wasn't dng anything i had just finished book and i wasn't looking for a sto and there was. and it all fell into place. i am not sure if it would happen that way again but if i saw a story that i fell in loveith, inow what i would do. i would go right it. >> host: your most recent novel, 2009, "e associate." where did you get the ideas for your novels? >> guest: that his book number 22 every book and show you methingn reality that happened, whether it happened to me as a lawyer, my career was nothat excing. it only lasted for ten years. but generally, something i have seen, someone i have known, a

case i was familiar th 20 years a orhenever, almost ery case goes back to reality, and i will take a fact situation, take what really happened, fictionalize it, sensationalize it, whenever they try to piece together a story that starts with a, an opening that is compelling. gi-wook got to hook your audience, you of that to put your audience pretty quick. if you go to a movie and nothing happs within the first ten minutes you are probabl in trouble, the movie is probably in trouble. that is a pretty good rule of thumb. i spent a lot of time, what is the great opening scene here? how can you get the reader invested in page 1? that is often the easy part. there are a lo of great

conflict, scenes, whatever, the dead body, smoking gun. ben you say how was it going to and then hopefully the in thing is something that the reader is not expecting an how do you sustain the narrative tension for 300 pages? how do you keep it going? i kick that around for a lot of ideas, sort of mentally and then when, when i could see the whole book, or i could see the whole story, i will start the process of actually laying it out on paper, and outline, chapter 1 what happens, chapter 2, what happens? how does that in in chapter 40, 300 pages later? that is a pretty tedious proces sometimes the out lines take longer than the actual writing of the novel but the longer i spend on the outline-- and i

have learned tt. i still screw up and i still do get lazy. that is a long-winded answer to savehe ideas come from almost always from real life. having said that, i don't know, i can't give you a specific example of with the ea for "the associate" came from. what has happened over the years is often people will say i enjoy your books b i really ved your earliest of. it offers the kind of bothered , like my books now don't live up to-- and i realized we all do that, whether it is music or movies or almost anything in popular culture, once we discover someone and watch their career, we tend to say well, liked his early stuff. i liked her early movies. whatever, it is juski of

what we do but i also ask myself over the years, have i changed the writing style? itas not been intentional. so "the associate" was a deliberate effort goack and recaptured the suspense of the firm, the pelican brief, the client. those three books came out of '91, #92 and '93. the movies, all three mies came out within a 12 months than all three vies were huge with bicats and all three movies are ponce tv's somewhere tonight 15 years later and looking back with the benefit of hindsight, those three were huge. they really paved the way for everything else, and so with "the assiate" id i'm going to go back and see if i can recaptur the thrill, the suspense and all the stuff that went into those three books and that is why i wrote "the

associate." there is no social issue, there's no soap b. i really have to watch the preaching, as my wife says. it is just old-fashioned suspense. >> host: where do you write? you mentioned that you write five or six ges a day? where dew right >> guest: right now we are sitting in downtown charlottesville just up the downtown mall and we live about 50 miles from their come away out in the country, a very remote area of the county. it is aboua 25 minute drive and it is very quiet. i have an office behind the house, a separate building, no faxes, nothing on the internet. i am not wired it all out there. i would never write a book on line subject to being hacked into, just because of fear. the computer that i wrote t "the associate" on, i bought it in 1993 and it has no written i

guess 18 books and it is about to collapse, so i have, i am now in the process of buying a new one. i am terrified about doing that. anyway it is a very quiet room, with no distractions. >> host: 1993, that is a pretty old computer. >> guest: it is a very old computer. >> host: what terrifies you about buying a new one? >> guesti have a apple laptop that dhey keep in the house. i don't spend a lot of time on line, but if you don't e-mailed, i have two kids who are in their 20s said ty bought the blackberry for christmas and taught me how to text so i feel like i am really high-tech these days. i am sort of resistance to that kind of stuff. i keep telling myself, you've got to grow up. we have these issues with kindle, e-book's. we are still flowing through those issuesbout how we are going to sell books in the

future and i am probably the last guy you ever wants to t something new. what is terrifying is just, look, a 16-year-old machine that i have sat down this morning at 8:00nd all my old normal, daily routines, you know on the computer, check in here and there anat that stuff and then did about three pages this morning in a short story. notoday, i wil be tomorrow. i will go back tomorrow and read what i wrote today and always fiddling with it and tinkering with it. it is a conspant process. >> host: but nobody gets to see those first versions, do they? on theomputer? >> guest: no one ever sees the very first dra, no because then it wouldet credit. the firs thing i prince is a true first draft. it is gun a ton of mistakes and

stuff i did not catch. >> host: you keep those? >> guest: my wife keeps those. i give those to my wife. she goes through with pretty good at it. she doesn't really, she read for content, story, plot and characters. is the story worth it? she always knows what the story is by the time i start writing the book. she knows what i'm going to be writing about. she doesn't kno the ending because i want to see how she reacts to it but she is very good about reading the first draft in saying that, with this character really is not working, or really don't like this part in the book. that is the type of editing she does. she has a reden. she loves to use it. i will g the first draft back from her, go through it again, clean it up then than that the draft goes to my agent in new

york eventually and he works off that. we go back and forth, back and forth. if we never cut corners on editing. a lot of big authors, once they reach a point they say okay, turn in the book and don't touch it. i am done with that. that is a mistake. i would be afraid to do that. my agent, david was meditor at doubleday. david bought the firm in 1990 and he has edited 21 books now, and so we ve obviously are very close and we have a close relationship. as f as david is concerned, the editors at doubleday andhe copyeditors, there has alway then this sort of a traparency in that they know they can say anything. nothing is off limits.

you can question anything. you can question a subplot, you can question the character, you can question the word. if something doesn't sound rig it is on the table and that is extra work for me but in the long run, there is not a lot of that. in the long run i tnk it makes for a better book. the two processes that's i described the outliningnd then the editing, are by far the most unpleasant parof writing a book. buthey are also the most important. the most unpleasant part of writing the bk is the author photo. i reay hate the author photo but every year we go t this process of, what is the photo going to be? i have actually published two or three books with no photo which is the way i prefer to do it, t doubleday always wants to kind of current photo. we don't cheat on the dating.

they are all current photos. >> host: what do you think, what your kids think, what does yourife think seeing one of your books made into a movie, walking to an airport in seeing your books everywhere? >> guest: well, i hope we don't, i hope we never ta for granted. the movies, we have sort of learned to live with them. the firm was the first movie. it cameut in the summer of 1993. that is 16 years ago. and ere have been eight or nine other movies since then. and, almost all of them have been enjoyable. i have beenucky with hollywood. ve only had one bad one chamber was a bad movie but again i have been lucky, so i ha never gotten all bent out of shape over the movies.

some wters are furious because they destroy their works or whatever. they are just movies. they don't change a word in the bo. they are at the local cinema for a month and then they are gone and then they are on tv forever. it is somdone else's interpretation owhatou have written. if you don't want to do that, then don't sell the film rigs. i have voiced taken the position, if you sel the film rights expected to be something different and don't complain about it. if you don't like that, don't take the money. as far as movies are concerned we have alwayhad fun with them. the kids, the kids will watch one of them on tv occasionally or portions of one. as far as saying the books in the airports, it is like, it is sort of like the movies-- sometimes, if we are traveling and i am not expecting to see my fa on the poster, i will stop

and kind of laugh in know and i always go over to watch the books to see ifeople are buying them, see how much activity we have got going on. but is really not, it is probably the perfect amounof fame. ifou value your privacy, it is not like i get stopped walking down thetreet. >> host: to yoget recognized? >> guest: i get recognized in certain places. obviously where it live. i am from mississippi ithe memphis area, yeah but people really intrude and i have never had a proem in public. i have never been threatened. eight baby really appreciate people who are truly famous and cannot live a normal life and that is what truly famous people deal with. they can be normal. my like this very normal and th keep it bill and quiet and that is the way want to live.

>> hos who were your fav riders? >> guest: contemporary, i would say john lacraig, the british guy is still my hero. i lovhis books i have got, pat conaway, i love that conaway, i love his books but the publishes once every ten years so it is hard to get excited. stephen king is a pretty good but he. we send books back fourth and we are always e-mling and i am i glad to get one of stephen's books. i can't say i always finish them but he does not finish mine either. stock is a great writer. i watched the otherawyers to see, out of cursity what they are writing about.

classical authors or dead author, still probly john steinbeck is my favorite. i grew up reading john steinbeck and still read a lot of it, an awful lot of it. but, like last year i went on a mark twain binge. i love mark twain. i read some of the short stories that i have never seen before. i read a great biography o mark twain by ron powers, just rely well done. so it often something like that and go for a full year. i started flying seven or eht years ago, pilot, learned how to fly so iead all of these books aboutviation. so i will chase stuff le that. a few years ago i went on a kick about world war ii and just read a bunch of books so it is all

over the place. it is not always the auction. it is probably have fiction, half non-fiction. >> host: no william faulkner? >> guest: i grew up in mississippi, and there is that to be a state lot down there that requires all kids to read faulkner or requires all high-school english teachers to teach fauner, and you know some of that, it is not alway accessible. i ha a great high school english teaer. she made us read faulkner but she also allow this to re steinbeck so we had fought their on one hand and faulkner on the other and w all preferred steinbeck. shirk, i appreciate the genius of faulkner and i appreciate his life and his commitment to his work, but i'm not going to tell you i read faulkner for pleasure. occasionally i will read faulkner book to s something i

missed in t past, but you've to have commitment. >> host: john grisham, his most recent book, "the associate." it is in nolle beaupre villie is written one nonfiction, 2006 "the innocent man" and coming up with a collection of short storie thank you being with us. >> guest: my pleasure. >> john grisham is the author of 20 novels and nonfiction book, "the innocent man." john gsham appeared at the 2009 virginia festival of the book. for more infortion visit thee a book.org. >> micha dirda longtime critic of "the waington post" a author of the book "classics for pleasure." how do you define a classic? >> epping classic is a book that peopleeep going back to generation after generation. it doesn't have to be one of these obvious classics that we think o shakespea and dante and and that the premise of th

book is a lot of the popular fiction of the 19th century or classical genre fiction are is important to us as the more obvious great books, so this collection of essays has pieces on people like safire or john webster, or obviously portant butlso on the crater of the regency romance in the grade science fiction writer, arthur doyle, mre james as the master of the english ghost story. i talk about books that shaped our imaginations of people keep going back to throughout their lives and as they say generation after generation. >> let's g back to genre fiction. what is genre fiction? >> guest: that is real a marketing device when you come right down to i publishers who say this is science fiction or fantasy. back in e 19th century, the late 19th century is the great age of the storyteller. the same people would write all

kinds of books. he wrote historical novels, he wrotevery sort of book or a story that he thought he could sell and it was only lately that he started assigning genres, so whener the, one of the things that i've worked on as the critic as to encourage peoplto kind of ignored the genre barriers, to go beyond them because there arereat books & books that "really speak to in areas that they tended to dismiss. they say i don't read a romance, but his books are is witty as jane austen and similar tohem, d it is a shame to dismi such bks without really havg tbied them, so the point of this book, "classics for pleasure" is to eourage people to try different kind of classics because i think there's a lot of pleasureo be had from those. >> you been a writer at "the

washington post" book world for nearly 30 years,nd you have for prior books about reading. when did you, wha was your reading habits as a kid? >> guest: well, my motr taught m to read before i was in kindergarten t they came from a very working-class steel town. my parents were not readers. my parents, my father was a steelworker and i grew older, i read more and more. he would get occasionally annoyed by this and would order me down to the basement to build something or outside to play. was not qui sure he liked his only so becoming such a boish sort. so they have mixed feelings about it but the more he what sort of critical of my reading, the more you want to do it. with your parents don't like it must be cool so i did more and more of that and at one point i found a copy of a book called the lifetime reading an by clifton federman of which is a

partial beyond the lifetime reader and i use that as a guide during my teenage years, the books to read and how much i got up of them is another question. my eyes when across the pages of the magic mountain when abbas 15 years old but what i got out of it i don't know. but i like to read. a.d. wyzenski, keep me dreams of another life. i wanted to move around the world and feel comfortable with all kinds of people and books for a way of introducing that to me and rubbing out some of the roof edges is a relatively-- then i went off to college and had a lot of culture shock and that is a whole other story. >> you are compiling this list, this compilation or their books from your childhood that you include it? >> guest: let me think. obviously the sheock holmes, talk about the o and g.k. chest and is and ther.

the father brown mysteries were among the fir mysteries i read. i love mysteries as a kid. in fact your i started off with sherlock wones then father brown and i read agatha christie and when i was in seventh grade, someone told me that crime and punishment was the murder story. at sounded good so i got it and read i in three days and that launch me into reading serious grown of books from that point on because it was ally good and it really is aerrific mystery as well as a great novel. >> in 2009 the book industry is going through great changes. and, your entire career has been in books. what do you see in the future for books as it begins the digital age? >> i have mixed feelings about it. i grew up in t pnts culture. for me coming from a working-class background as for many generations before my income of books being educated

through books was the way up and out whereas now computers seem to have replaced that in a lot of toys for kids as the kind of key for success in multiple careers. but by love, i lovedooks. i love the feel of them, i love the fact that they are different sizes. one of my objections to the things like kendall is the kind of homogenizes everything, they look all alike. the candle is in the-- electronic reader thatou can download text and use it as a screen as a way of reading a book but it doesn't give you a sense of how far you aren a book. en you read a book you know you have gut ten pages lathan you don't have that on the screen. because there really value our literature i know is going to survive because people need it. th way we access to use aikins-- computer term may differ but back to thousan years ago people probably said when the kobach book came out, the book like that one, they

said what was wrong with scrolls. scrolls we gre. why do we have this new technology? we got along without scrolls and we can get along with the printed books but i do think they will be around for a while because we like them. were drawn to them and i do kno that everybody who has a bg, everyone who is committed to the internet seemingly they'll want to have the book. having a blog is enough. having a published book. >> as a book reviewer your entire career and being at the's book world which recently has been folded into the rest of "the washington post," i believe it stands alone as the only standalone book revie where will people discuss books in the future and where will people review books? is it in the blood source of on the net? >> that is really a good question and a proematic one because the business of

newspaper sections and magazine sections david common meeting place for people interested in the life of the lind, culture, art and books in general where everybody read the same boo sections. whereas with the internet everybody goes to diff from blogs, different sides. theris a lot less of a common ground so at is worrisome. i imagine that gradually over time idid in nspapers, the magazine's well-tablished such strong, and presences that people will go to them to be in the way that they now read the print and paper versions of the paper the magazine orome of the what sites and books sites will emerge as key once that more and more people will go in, so they will gradually replace t book stions. but it is a loss i think. there is a great pleasure of reading the sunday paper or picking up the paper on the way toork on the subway and having

all this culture together in a convenient andisposable form. and, i mean books, books and newspapers are justool things and it would b a shame for them not to be around. >> you talked about everyone at one time readinghe same book review. you have in here mary shelley's frankenstein a i think most americans can identify with those two literary figures. aside from harry potter, do we have that common dialog anymore? >> guest: we do have to some degree. books willecome popular and obviously there was a period when was the only person in america who had never read the davinci code so there are certain book the become bestsellers censor riders will become popular and they will, there will be the kind of conversations described among at least certain bodies of med. david foster wallace, there was

such a great outpouring when he committed suicide because he had so many devoted readers and people were fascinated by his worknd his shorter pieces and looking forward to his nt novel so there was someone who brought a lot of peoe together. i can remember when kurd fun agn. died. i was tonished at how immediate, i thought he was more some of my generation buddies seems to have had lt been tohed a lot of life so there are writers like that. john updike's death obviously brought forth a lot of reflection by lot of people so there will be the writers toward meaningful to us. one of my goals as theeviewer is to whenever possible not to review any book that is going to be on the best-seller list because i try to encourage people to read beyond the best-seller list because those are often books that wil speak to them mo powerfully and they

are really good book by the more specialized reader who doesn become a bestseller phenomenon that i worry about, those are books that people were made part of their lives when they were members of the book-of-theonth ub and went to the library to check out books. the domination of trade names as you might say on the best-seller lists. it is i think it kind of restrat of trade for most readers. not that stephen king or james patterson or any number of other people don write good books, but i don't want people just reading their books. i want tm to read all kinds of books and that is where the book section and books like "classics fo pleasure" encourage people to do, every the rounds, don't just follow the herd to the few books that are on the front of the sre. look at the shelves, go to the brary, talk to your friends,

talk to librarians. what do they like and then explore the books of the past as well as the present. >> i'm going to bring you to task because you just mentioned it, you are a bookseller and i walk into your bookstore and i want michael dirda to recommend three books to me to purchase. >> "an open book" i michael dirda. right, not those books. i probably want know more about you but sinci know that you write science fiction i might recommend my favorite fanty writer in man named jack fant, the most famous bk the dying earth. great influence on chapin. shape and and i when that to see vance when he was an oakland. he might be someone i recommend. a lot of people who say i don't like science fiction or fantasy and i say the the left hand of darkness, a book that examines

every sort of aspect of our lives, sexual relations, gender, the heroes, all sortsf interesting elements plus is beautifuy written. that is the key of course, things that are beautifully written. and then, it is always hard to do that come to to recommend books. this is why i've had to write five of them filled with lists and title then things that i thk people might want to check out, so not to be self promoting but i do think these books are usul for just the reason you describe, at they will tell people about books that might want to try. >> what do we lea from reading literature? a lot of the books and he are literary in nature, they are fiction. >> the genre books are the highnd genreiction. what do we learn? we enrich our lives and their lives become