Interview With a Bibliophile
Maya Sinha
It’s Monday, and time once again for “Interview With a Bibliophile” in which I invite some lovely bibliophiles I know to answer some questions about literary tastes, reading habits, and recommendations. This is to pique some interest among friends and family about new book finds, to stir up some thought provoking ideas, and to simply share our mutual love of the printed word. If you love books, I hope you will join us and take a look!
Today I welcome my writer friend Maya Sinha to the interview. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Lamp Magazine, Dappled Things, Book & Film Globe, Sostenuto and many other publications. Her novel, The City Mother can be found at Chrism Press She lives in Northern California with her family.
Maya grew up in a town boasting 12,000 souls in eastern New Mexico, ten miles from the Texas border. After college, she worked briefly as a cowgirl waitress at a Santa Fe restaurant. She was a staff writer for the Santa Fe Reporter before moving to California for law school. Later, as a lawyer with school-aged kids, she wrote a regular humor column for the local newspaper. She began writing her first novel, The City Mother, while on maternity leave from her job as a litigation associate at a San Francisco law firm. She has lived in a California college town for the last fifteen years, but confesses she has never lost her nostalgia for snow. One dream she aspires to fulfill one day is to spend two weeks at a retreat center in rural Kansas, in almost total silence.
I met Maya when she generously sent me a short story to publish at my very fledgling writer’s website experiment, Sostenuto. Later, I found her once again on Substack and was glad indeed. She is honest, straightforward and funny with a refreshingly piquant take on the world. I am honored to have her as a guest today. So, let’s get down to it!
As a writer, do you have an author whom you love and admire over and above the rest; as in a writer who makes you stop mid paragraph with a sigh of satisfaction at the way he/she just left you speechless? You can have more than one.
This is a hard question to answer, since I did most of my serious reading in my twenties, but, as an adult Catholic convert, my value system has since changed.
Many of the novelists I once admired, most notably Martin Amis—whose 1995 novel The Information I re-read obsessively—are not writers whose worldviews I find very interesting at this point.
I tend to like edgy, ironic writers of the modern age: writers like stand-up comics with no sacred cows and a dark sense of humor. Yet, nihilism is unappealing to me; it just seems juvenile at this point.
Overall, I’d say my most admired writer is Muriel Spark. She is supremely confident, keen-eyed, effortlessly funny, slightly bitchy, always calling it like she sees it—and what she sees is the absurd and tragicomic human state in the searing light of the Catholic moral vision.
Though a convert, she was not personally pious, but her fiction takes place in a Catholic universe and, like Catholicism, is perennially strange and fresh. Spark is a bleary modern sophisticate with the worldview of a Victorian priest: namely, Cardinal John Henry Newman, a major influence on her. She’s never nice; merely observant, witty, daring, and right. To me, these are the ideal traits of a woman writer.
What is your favorite genre of book?
For most of my life, I’ve read literary fiction—or, put another way, non-genre fiction.
I don’t know if Kurt Vonnegut, whom I loved as a teenager, is “literary,” but he is funny and thought-provoking and has a distinctive voice, qualities that set the early template for my taste in novels. In my college and post-college years, I burrowed into canonical 20th century authors, including Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Milan Kundera, John Updike, Iris Murdoch, and Saul Bellow. This sounds like heavy lifting, but I enjoyed them all. I was learning how idiosyncratic a novel can be and all it can contain: jokes, poems, rants, philosophical musings, random asides—you name it. Back then, plot seemed like the least interesting thing about that highly sophisticated medium, the novel, in which the play of human consciousness itself can be expressed.
Two decades later, as a busy working mother, I’d go into bookstores and find no novel I wanted to buy. I’d already read all my favorites, and most new literary novels seemed bland and pointless. Equipped with a laptop and smartphone, I had plenty of other things to read—juicy hot takes that slipped into my mind and out again in seconds, requiring no effort and leaving no trace. I was tired, middle-aged, jaded, easily bored.
It was the perfect moment for detective novels. Many were extremely well-written, and they were gripping and suspenseful from the start. The authors seemed to respect my time and need for a diversion from my inner life—or, as in new literary fiction, the inner life of a neurotic, amoral character even more annoying than myself. These novels engaged my intellect and bolstered my sense of a moral order. Set in various lands and cultures, they looked outward, curious about the world, while exploring the mysteries of evil and the crooked human heart.
Though I write literary fiction, detective fiction is my current favorite genre. I especially love C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, about a crime-solving hunchback lawyer during the bloodthirsty reign of Henry VIII. I’m still learning all the amazing things a novel can do.
What kind of books are out of your comfort zone; the ones you never gravitate to but think you should try? Why?
Most theological and spiritual writing is out of my comfort zone, though I dip into it from time to time and feel I should read more. When both my teenagers are grown and I have more quiet time—and the ability to hold a complex thought for more than five seconds—I hope to dive into the writing of Cardinal Newman and other Catholic thinkers. I’ve studied a bit of Aquinas and Augustine, and I know that engaging with theology will both deepen my own writing and be rewarding in its own right.
Do you have a life changing book? One that you could not put down and one which made it hard for you to return to everyday life?
The most life-changing book I ever read was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a children’s book published in 1905. Though I haven’t read it since I was eleven, it made a lasting impression on me and probably started the path to my conversion.
The novel first excited me due to a misunderstanding: I thought its child heroine, born in India, was half-Indian like me. So I closely followed the story of Sara Crewe, a motherless girl at an English boarding school whose father dies overseas, leaving her at the mercy of two adult sisters. One sister actively dislikes her, while the other is weak and easily bullied. They install her in a cold attic room, hungry and dressed in rags, while constantly gaslighting her about how well they’re treating her and how she should be grateful for their charity.
This is a dark story for a child. I read it many times, trying to understand its deep currents. It fascinated me how Sara responded to these events.
I was being raised in an extremely fatalistic version of Hinduism, centered on the supposedly predictive powers of Vedic astrology. For my entire childhood, I had been confidently informed who I was, what qualities I possessed, what mistakes I would eventually make, how long I would live, and how any attempt to avoid my fate was futile—all based on my astrological birth chart. I could not wrap my mind around this information, or what I was supposed to do with it. It seemed a little cut-and-dried, even to me.
But Sara Crewe possessed a stubborn power to define herself. She was not the lowly nobody the sisters said she was. She was a princess in her own mind—and somehow, in reality—and she resolved to act with dignity and honor. Even as a destitute orphan, she had free will, and she used it to be brave, hopeful, and kind. Sara’s ability to choose virtue in difficult circumstances was her freedom, and she had a happy ending.
I read this book so many times, it seemed to rewire my brain. It was a Lives of the Saints story that spoke to me directly, in the exact format I could understand.
Name five books you think every reluctant adult reader should read in order to jump start their reading habits.
These are five books I couldn’t put down, even with my smartphone on the nightstand:
The Good Death of Kate Montclair by Daniel McInerny. This 2023 release by my fellow Chrism Press author is one of the best novels set in the present day I’ve read in years. Literary fiction, highly readable without sacrificing depth.
To Crown with Liberty by Karen Ullo. Chrism Press editor Ullo has a screenwriting background, and her mastery of pacing shows in this quietly devastating 2024 novel set amid the political violence and destruction of the French Revolution.
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. This 1951 novel by a Scottish playwright has been called “one of the best mysteries of all time.” Hospitalized and immobile after an accident, a Scotland Yard detective investigates the centuries-old murder of Richard III’s nephews, the princes in the tower.
Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James. A panoramic view of the genre by your tour guide, James, one of the greats. This nonfiction 2009 book will have you jotting down new authors to explore in every chapter.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen. This 2024 nonfiction book about the author’s brilliant childhood friend reads like a novel. The ending is haunting, with sobering lessons for real life.
How have your reading habits affected your writing life?
While working and raising kids, reading novels took a backseat to the exigencies of the day. I read what I could when I could, and the same went for creative writing.
But now that my kids are car-driving teenagers, I’m able to read almost every day. One of my greatest pleasures is to go out in the backyard in the evening with a novel, a glass of lemonade or beer, and read fiction for an hour or more. It’s like being a kid again: doing exactly what I want to do, left alone to dwell in imagination.
I’m learning, too, that writing fiction is a loose, relaxed endeavor of the creative brain, not one more nagging chore to be crossed off the list. The more time and grace I give myself to rest, read, and enjoy life, the more I can bring to the page.
These days, a habit of daily reading reminds me why I love to write. It’s like surrounding myself with the smartest, funniest, most interesting people and wanting to join the party by contributing something of my own. Because I was right in my twenties: the play of human consciousness, expressed in novels, is the best party there is.
That last phrase says it all! It is “the best party there is!” Thank you, Maya, for sitting down to share your thoughts with me on books and writing. There are some new-to-me authors in this interview and I look forward to checking them out. I especially enjoyed your thoughts on Sarah Crewe. That story always haunted me as a child. You gave me some insights into a possible why. I, too, couldn’t stop reading and re-reading it!
In closing, I wish you more time in the backyard with your books, and one day finding your way to the silence of that Kansas retreat center. You can find more of Maya’s thoughts at her substack: https://substack.com/@mayasinha
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I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull