The author, most recently, of “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” says his favorite writer is Evelyn Waugh, “even though he so despised Americans that, if he were alive to hear this compliment, he would swat it back across the net.”

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

According to the increasingly hazardous-looking ziggurat on my bedside table: Paul Scott’s “The Raj Quartet”; David Nasaw’s biography of William Randolph Hearst, “The Chief”; Christopher Hitchens’s “Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man”; Eric Jaffe’s “The King’s Best Highway”; Frank Langella’s memoir, “Dropped Names”; the “Collected Stories” of Roald Dahl; Ellin Stein’s history of the National Lampoon, “That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick”; Hiram Maxim’s autobiography, “My Life” (he invented the Maxim gun in the 1880s, providing Hilaire Belloc with the couplet “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not”); Edna O’Brien’s memoir, “Country Girl”; John Keegan’s biography of Churchill, titled, oddly, “Winston Churchill”; Bill Bryson’s biography of Shakespeare, also oddly titled “Shakespeare”; and George H. W. Bush’s collection of letters, “All the Best.”

Whether this reflects catholicity or A.D.D., I can’t say. Probably A.D.D. What was your question? I can say for certain that since there are 1,926 pages in “The Raj Quartet,” I will still be reading it in the year 2039.

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

I’m a Libra, so I claim astrological right of indecision as between Edmund Morris’s “This Living Hand” and Alexandra Fuller’s “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.” Both are exquisitely written. Edmund Morris is of course chiefly known for his Theodore Roosevelt trilogy biography; its first volume won the Pulitzer Prize. This collection of essays and articles is a calliope of talent and range. Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of her mother’s growing up in Kenya is breathtakingly tragic, triumphant and lyrical. It only just occurred to me now that both authors grew up in Africa.