By the Book Interview With Judi Dench

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

That’s an impossible question. The best in 89 years? How do I know? I remember being given A.P. Wavell’s “Other Men’s Flowers” as a birthday present when I was young. It’s a collection of poetry, which opened my eyes to the power of verse. But then I also adored “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith. My husband, Michael [Williams], bought it for me as a holiday read. I devoured it and didn’t want it to end. I had to ration myself to a couple of pages a day.

What’s the last great book you read?

“Dormouse Has a Cold,” by Julia Donaldson. It’s a lift-the-flap children’s book, sent to me when I was recovering from a cold.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

After lights out at boarding school when I was 15. I was in bed under the covers with a torch reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

How do you organize your books?

I don’t. I have so many books, but never enough shelves, so I have books everywhere — piled up on tables, chairs, running along window sills, books in every available nook and cranny. Because of my eyesight I can no longer read, but I love being surrounded by books — they’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones. I still have my father’s individual copies of the Temple Shakespeare from 1903. They’re small, red-leather-bound copies with gilt lettering on the cover, and if I hold one I can be transported back to my childhood and family quizzes about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s writing, you say in the new book, “has the capacity to make us feel less alone.” What other writing has done that for you?

Oh so many — Iris Murdoch, Chekhov, Zoë Heller, J.D. Salinger — any writer who can reflect us back to ourselves and help us discover who we are.