Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and an author of five non-fiction books. So what does she read for her own pleasure?

Is there a difference between your work reading and what you read for pleasure? Under the best of circumstances, they are one and the same, but often they are not. I try to do more of the latter because reading is my prime pleasure and I find reading things I “have to” robs it of serendipity.

How do you select the books you read purely for pleasure?

I love picking out what to read next so much that I begin before I even finish the book I’m reading. I’ll select a shortlist of five or six books and add to that pile when someone mentions a book at work, or I read about an author online, or my mood changes. I’ve tried to be disciplined about planning what I read, and failed. At the beginning of this year, for example, I felt too pulled in other directions by the news and work and life so resolved to only read books that you could pick up and put down – books on self-help, humour, books I had lying around on coffee tables. But I fell off the wagon after two books like this, getting sucked into a James Lasdun thriller and then his memoir.

You’ve written five non-fiction books. In the latest, My Life With Bob, you note the perils of book recommendations – do you recommend books to people?

All the time. I am sure I annoy people. But I don’t expect people to take my advice. I used to, but have grown more mature about it because I know how of-the-moment a reading decision can be. There are two people who actually follow my book advice: my cousin Kirsten and one of my brothers, Nick. This is by far their best quality. Sometimes my husband also takes my recommendations and vice versa. This winter he spent a lot of time reading about Hitler, though, and I was not in the mood.

You read Holocaust literature at an early age. Are you still drawn to dark books?

I adore dark books and I love meeting other people who love them too so we can talk about this penchant shamelessly. I recently had a long conversation about this with Robert Gottlieb, the legendary former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, and author of Avid Reader: A Life. At our first lunch, he told me he was reading books about death and I felt an instant kinship. A few dark books I’ve loved in recent years include Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose Novels, which broke my heart, and Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, her memoir of losing her parents, husband and two young sons in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. I was overcome. I cried on the subway. I read it in one fell swoop. We named it one of our 10 best books of the year. Most recently, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian seized me with horror. I love when books have the power to unnerve you.

Why do you turn to the classics when you are looking for something reliable to read?

I am still in awe of the books that I grew up considering the greats of English literature, the canon. Also, the Russians. To me, those are the books you are supposed to read – the Eliots, Whartons, Austens, Dickens, Conrads, Tolstoys – and they always reward the time investment. There is a reason these books have endured. When I really want to sink into a good book to the extent that it becomes my life more than life itself, these are the books I seek out. And after a long Dickens hiatus, I want to read a number I still haven’t read: Little Dorrit, Martin Chuzzlewit. I also need to find time to reread War and Peace. Perhaps in retirement.

You have said that A Journey of One’s Own by Thalia Zepatos changed your life. How?

When I read it in college I was very much stuck on the predictable Type-A path I’d been on since grade school: study, test, success, next stop. But I wasn’t sure what the next stop would be after college. I figured it would be a similar pattern of aspiration and achievement, only the grown-up version: job interview, job, pay cheque, savings account, promotion, pay cheque etc. I couldn’t conceive of what life meant without set goals and checklists. A Journey of One’s Own revealed an independent and aimless way of life that had never occurred to me. I read it, stopped interviewing for post-collegiate jobs and bought a one-way ticket to northern Thailand, leaving my Filofax-mindset behind.

Paper or e-book?

Only paper. I look at screens all day. And I love the book as physical object – the texture of the paper, the smell of the glue, the cover design, the heft. I don’t mind heavy books at all. Their weight is part of their force.

Name a book that surprised you, and why?

I think all books have to surprise you in some way, don’t they? I will just name the last book I read, which was Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, about the assassination of President James A. Garfield. Most Americans, if they know anything about President Garfield, know only that he was assassinated shortly after taking office. So it was a great surprise to learn what an inspiring figure he was – an autodidact who was born into abject poverty, lost his father at age two and after one year in college was made a full professor. He was an early and devoted abolitionist. He was humble, a rarity among politicians today, and a man of principle. I now want to read everything Millard has written.

You have said that you enjoyed the intellectual challenge of reading someone you disagree with.

In general, I think it’s important to read a wide range of writers with different voices, styles, temperaments and points of view because otherwise, you limit yourself to the echo chamber. People today are already so siloed into narrow strains of thought by social media, narrowcast news channels and we-think-this-way websites. Books provide a place where different viewpoints can settle in.

Each week you interview a writer in your By the Book column. Name someone, alive or dead, you would like to interview.

Can I take one of each? Barack Obama, alive. Christopher Hitchens, dead.

Pamela Paul will appear at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne on May 22 and at the Sydney Writers’ Festival from May 25 to 28.