Q. Did your passion for reading come to you as a child?
A. Yes, my parents were avid readers and left everything they read within reach of our sight and hands; newspapers, books, essays, comics, encyclopedias. The offer was endless. I believed that it was something normal in all homes and when I discovered that it was not like that I greatly valued that privilege.
Q. The first book that made you continue reading forever, the one that stuck in your memory?
R. Gulliver’s Travelsby Jonathan Swift. I believed that I was all the characters and I found it very erotic that the Lilliputians walked around the protagonist’s body and tied him up.
Q. Titles that you have in mind since you read?
A. In the library of my memory they are The Three Musketeersby Alexandre Dumas Big hopesby Charles Dickens and Return to Bridesheadby Evelyn Waugh.
Q. Novel, biography, essay, poetry? If you have to choose, which genre wins first?
A. I would say the novel, because it is what I have written the most and a writer is, above all, a reader.
Q. The last book you read?
R. Three enigmas for the Organization, by Eduardo Mendoza. I adore Mendoza at any stage of his life and his writing. He has said many times in promoting it that he had not considered it, but that his penultimate book would be his last.
Q. Luckily that’s not the case. Did you have fun reading?
A. It is a hilarious tangle of retirees who have to unravel a case of mafias, kidnappings, old traditions linked to the Franco regime, capricious ghosts, mysterious Russian women, a ship that sinks in full view of everyone in the port of Barcelona. That Barcelona that Mendoza recreates so deliciously.
Q. If I ask you for a title that impressed you?
R. beautiful and cursedby Francis Scott Fitzgerald. It was a book that made me fly, it shot my mind upwards, towards infinity, and I flew.
Q. Any immovable books on your nightstand?
R. Biographies, which I devour, and many of Vargas Llosa, his classics and the most recent, such as Five corners, tough times and I dedicate my silence to you.
Q. Do you recommend any biography?
A. Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography published in 1991 and which was a bestseller, and Truman Capote’s autobiography written by Gerald Clarke and published in 1988.
Q. Paper or electronic?
A. Both! More paper for novels and books.
