The author of “The Way the World Works” suspects Shakespeare is the most overrated writer of all time. “Although I must say his sonnets are incredible.”

What book is on your night stand now?

The floor next to the bed is my true night stand. On it is a heap of books — things like John Masters’s “Bhowani Junction,” Joan Aiken’s “Nightbirds on Nantucket,” Grace Paley’s “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” Harold Robbins’s “The Carpetbaggers,” and Lederer and Burdick’s “The Ugly American.” Some books have been there a very long time. I reach down without looking and grab something and read a little of it, and then I put it back in the heap.

Last night my hand landed on John Toland’s “Infamy,” about Pearl Harbor, and I read 50 pages — it’s tremendous in a certain way. All books are incomplete. In my briefcase, which is perhaps my true, true night stand, I’ve been carrying around the galleys of Katie Roiphe’s “In Praise of Messy Lives.” Roiphe’s willing to say risky things, and she has a prosey astringency that makes me happy.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Recently I listened to Graham Greene’s “The Human Factor,” read by Tim Pigott-Smith. It’s a little repetitive here and there, especially at the beginning, but honestly, it’s an extraordinary, careful novel that works up to something true and sad and worth spending time with. I also liked Greene’s autobiography, “A Sort of Life.”