The last book that made you cry?

See above.

The last book that made you furious?

I don’t do fury. (I mean, where would it end?) But I do wonder was George Eliot wise to spell out what happened later to the main characters in the afterword of her novel “Middlemarch.”

Whom do you consider the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present?

George Moore from the past (“Esther Waters” is his masterpiece); Eugene McCabe from the present (“Death and Nightingales” is his masterpiece).

Do you read different kinds of books depending on where you are living at the time?

In the summer I try and finish one long story or short novel a day, usually ones I have read before. For example: Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murad,” James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Joyce’s “The Dead,” Samuel Beckett’s “Company,” Nadine Gordimer’s “The Late Bourgeois World,” Juan Goytisolo’s “The Blind Rider,” Philip Roth’s “Everyman,” John McGahern’s “The Country Funeral,” David Malouf’s “The Valley of Lagoons,” Tobias Wolff’s “Old School,” Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs,” Don DeLillo’s “Cosmopolis.”

Who are your favorite Irish writers? And what are the best books about Ireland?

I love Tim Robinson’s books on the Irish landscape and heritage — especially “Stones of Aran” and his trilogy of books about Connemara — for the depth of his knowledge and the way he makes sentences. The other books I would suggest to anyone who wanted to make sense of Ireland over the past hundred years or so are the poems of Paul Durcan, the plays of Tom Murphy, the novels of Anne Enright and Roy Foster’s two-volume biography of Yeats.

Who’s your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

I wish I was Leopold Bloom, the man who wanders Dublin in “Ulysses.” I love the way he notices and registers things, his wit, his sensuous good humor. I envy all the fun he had when he went to Nighttown and got involved in gender-bendering. The villain I like best is Casaubon in “Middlemarch.” Since I am aging, solitary and bookish myself, I feel real sympathy for him and am sure that Dorothea, whom he marries, could not have been a bundle of laughs. Casaubon is given a raw deal in the book, and readers like to dislike him, but the older I get the more sympathy I have for him as he tries to finish an unfinishable book and then is brave enough to get married to a young woman. I feel sorry when he dies.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I could not read until I was 9, by which time I had developed a serious stammer. Although my mother once warned me that being a dimwit was likely to have dire consequences, my parents were sweet enough not to mention my stammer or my non-reading much and were smart enough not to seek professional help. They left me to myself. Thus I have no childhood books or authors, but I had plenty of time to think and also to study things and people. I did then learn to read, and I think I disturbed the folks more when I became addicted to poetry and, as a teenager, learned Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” by heart. It took me a bit longer to get rid of the stammer. Even still, in leading a mystery of the rosary, I have no problem with “Our Father” since it begins with a vowel, or “Hail Mary” since it starts with a soft H, but I have to do a hell of a lot of light and heavy breathing as I approach the hard consonant start of “Glory be to the Father.”