Book Brahmins: Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1956, and grew up in what he calls the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. His first job, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, resulted in his nonfiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. Later he wrote a novel set in the Museum, called Relic, co-authored with Lincoln Child, which was made into a box office hit movie by Paramount Pictures. In Relic, Preston and Child introduced the fictional FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast, who has now appeared in many of their books. His latest novel is Blasphemy, published by Tor/Forge last Tuesday. In addition to writing novels, Preston writes nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. He spends his free time riding horses in New Mexico and tooling around the Maine coast in an old lobster boat. Preston counts in his ancestry the poet Emily Dickinson, the newspaperman Horace Greeley and the infamous murderer and opium addict Amasa Greenough. Here he answers questions we like to ask:
 
On your nightstand now:
 
My wife hates my overflowing nightstand, tottering with books. "You can't be reading all those books!" she says. A selection: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. Case, Amore, Universi by Fosco Maraini (I always try to be reading one book in Italian), a copy of Scientific American, a copy of the New Republic, Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, The Hard Way by Lee Child, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry, Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis, the Kama Sutra (just kidding), a broken watch, loose change, a clock, a belt buckle, a button, a lamp, three pens, a shoehorn, a crumpled wad of receipts, a 50-euro note and a plastic glow-in-the-dark fly.
 
Favorite books when you were a child:
 
The Curious Lobster by Richard Warren Hatch, The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
 
Your top five authors:
 
Leo Tolstoy, A. Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabokov, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens
 
Book you've faked reading:
 
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
 
Book you are an evangelist for:
 
Saturday by Ian McEwan
 
Book you've bought for the cover:
 
Hmmmm. I almost bought Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk because of the cover. Horrible book, glad I didn't.
 
Book that changed your life:
 
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
 
Favorite line from a book:
 
"Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun . . ."--Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
 
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins