Brenda Wineapple Has Come Around on Historical Fiction

What books are on your night stand?

Jan Morris’s “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.” It’s about the city she first visited as a soldier after World War II — and about the weirdness of time and history. Also Fernanda Eberstadt’s nervy “Bite Your Friends,” stories of artists and activists who use their bodies to defy the status quo. And Caoilinn Hughes’s “The Alternatives” and Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos,” both up next, that is after I finish “War and Peace.”

What book would people be surprised to find on your shelves?

“Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter,” by Dale Messick.

How do you organize your books?

I don’t. Mine is an orderly disorder: I keep the books I’m reading and using for work near at hand, even if that means on the floor around my desk. As for the rest, my husband, whose organization skills rank among his many gifts, arranges them according to category and then, within those categories, he alphabetizes. His is an orderly order.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

Reading a novel in the wee hours of the morning, when the city is quiet. I curl up on the couch beneath my favorite bookcases, and often stay there until the sky is streaked with morning light.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

That Mary Anning, a young, self-taught fossil hunter, was the first to discover and excavate large dinosaur skeleton fossils near her home in Lyme Regis, England, and became one of the foremost contributors to paleontology.

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What do you read to relax?

Relax? Well, often poetry: the strangely consoling Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the witty Emily Dickinson and, recently, Louise Glück. Whitman, too, never fails, even when he’s annoying. Plus, I’ve discovered the addictive mystery writer Tana French.