The author of “The Goldfinch” and “The Secret History” says that personally, “to paraphrase Nabokov: all I want from a book is the tingle down the spine, for my hairs to stand on end.”

What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

I’ve always got a dozen books going, which is why my suitcases are always so heavy. At the moment: Am greatly enjoying the Neversink Library reissue of Jean Cocteau’s “Difficulty of Being,” since my copy from college is so torn up the pages are falling out. Am also loving Rachel Kushner’s “Telex From Cuba” and Gilbert Highet’s “Poets in a Landscape,” a charming appreciation of Catullus and Propertius and the Latin poets. (I love almost all the reissues of the New York Review Books Classics — at the Corner Bookstore, uptown, they shelve them all together, and I always make a beeline for that shelf the instant I set foot in the store.) On the table by my bed: “Byron: The Last Journey,” by Harold Nicolson; “Horse, Flower, Bird,” by Kate Bernheimer; Barry Paris’s biography of Louise Brooks; and “Rifleman: A Front-Line Life,” by Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud. I always have a comfort book going too, something I’ve read many times, and for me at the moment that comfort book is Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”

What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

I certainly haven’t enjoyed anything more than “The Unquiet Grave,” by Cyril Connolly, which I went back and reread sometime early this year. I’ve loved it since I was a teenager and like always to have it to hand; when I lived in France, years ago, it was one of only six books I carried with me — but because of its aphoristic nature, usually I only read bits and pieces of it, and it’s been many years since I read the whole thing start to finish.

Who are your favorite novelists?

The novelists I love best, the ones who made me want to become a writer, are mostly from the 19th century: Dickens, Melville, James, Conrad, Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, with Dickens probably coming first in that list. As far as 20th-century novelists go, I love Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Don DeLillo; and of the 21st century, my two favorites so far are Edward St. Aubyn and Paul Murray.