The author, most recently, of “Autumn” ranks “Invitation to a Beheading” among the great books: “Nabokov treats us to, then liberates us from, the bad farce of totalitarianism. What a blast.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

I don’t have a night stand. If I read at night in bed or too close to sleep-time, I lie awake thinking in the dark for hours. But there are books piled randomly everywhere around the house, and I read randomly from them — the little pillar of books here next to me at the moment is formed by Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades”; Han Kang’s “Human Acts”; Kate Tempest’s “Let Them Eat Chaos”; Dilys Powell’s “The Villa Ariadne”; Jenni Fagan’s “The Sunlight Pilgrims”; Gillian Beer’s book about Lewis Carroll’s Alice, “Alice in Space”; and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.”

What’s the last great book you read?

“Invitation to a Beheading,” in which Nabokov treats us to, then liberates us from, the bad farce of totalitarianism. What a blast. I recently read “Pale Fire” for the first time too (so am now forever inoculated against critics), and the energy in it, the vision, the richness, the force of voice, the panache, the detail (e.g., the gift of the source of the word “eavesdrop”) — reading Nabokov is always liberating, the joy of not just the pure originality but also the knowing what safe hands you’re in speeding along the unsafe edge of the curve high up the side of the mountain.

What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time?

“1984.” I’ve read a lot of Orwell, but not this, till last year. The Two Minutes Hate — the Two Minutes Tweet? “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, . . . an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” Plus, a rereading can feel like a first-time read in itself, which is another great thing about books and time; we think we know them, but as we change with time, so do they, with us. And to take this thought a little further: Over the past few years the poet Jamie McKendrick has been producing new translations of the works by the great Italian writer Giorgio Bassani that go to make up his “Il Romanzo di Ferrara,” and something, maybe McKendrick’s understanding of the poet in Bassani, means that the reread is a kind of new discovery. I felt the same about Sandra Smith’s translation of Camus’s “L’Étranger.” It’s like she’d studied and understood the heartbeat of the original syntax. I wish someone would ask her to retranslate all of Camus.