At dinner I asked my friend who he’d like to meet. “Good question,” he said. Let me try to answer it:
1. John Horton Conway. A Princeton math professor who’s combined math and human interest better than anyone since John Von Neumann. I especially like his work on numbers and games and The Book of Numbers, which he wrote with Richard Guy.
2. Lauren Collins. She and Mark Singer are the best writers at The New Yorker. As I recently blogged, I loved her profile of Pascal Dangin.
3. Chimamanda Adichie. I blogged about a recent short story of hers. Reading her reminds me how I used to read lots of fiction and how much I liked it.
The person I don’t know who I most wish would write another book is Renata Adler. If a book can be stillborn, Private Capacity, supposed to be published in 2002, was that. From Wikipedia: “Renata Adler’s investigation of the Bilderberg group reveals the true history of the organization, its membership and its nebulous function. With an astonishing cache of Bilderberg archives and secret files, Adler charts the history of the organization and the extent of its power.” Sounds like it exists, doesn’t it? It ranks 5 million on Amazon, maybe because I ordered a copy. Second most: Ben Cheever. I loved Selling Ben Cheever.