After his novel Feed, which imagined a world in which teens have a microchip installed in their brains to receive a constant flow of information, earned a slot as a National Book Award Finalist in 2002, M.T. Anderson won the 2006 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for the inaugural volume in his two-part historical novel set during the American Revolution, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party. This week readers will discover what becomes of the hero after his escape from the College of Lucidity, where he had been an "experiment" to a group of Boston philosophers, when Candlewick publishes The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves.On your nightstand now:
Kiran Desai's Himalayan epic The Inheritance of Loss and Raymond Chandler's The High Window. Both books about mean streets, some steeper than others.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anything by Ray Bradbury. Books like Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles defined for me what it was like to live in small-town America. And on another planet.
Your top five authors:
Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Brockdon Brown, Donald Barthelme, Laurence Sterne and Tove Jansson.
Book you've faked reading:
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. Yeah, okay, it's not so long, but I was in a tight position.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Two autobiographies: for adults, Fanny Burney's Journals and Letters, a deeply moving glimpse at a brilliant woman over 70 years. She begins her journal as a slip of girl. Secretly, without knowledge of her father, she becomes one of the country's leading novelists of wit. She is forced unwillingly to become a handmaid to the Queen of England . . . finally falls in love in middle-age . . . and on and on. She describes it all in a series of astounding portraits.
Also, I often recommend Henry Bibb's Narrative to high school teachers who want to discuss slavery but who don't want to force the kids to untangle Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is thrilling, tragic and triumphant.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Who cares about the covers? I read only books with matching spines. Of course, this kind of restricts my reading to Penguin Classics and the Library of America.
Book that changed your life:
I fear to say that I devoured everything by Evelyn Waugh as a teenager and, as a result, ended up in an English boarding school, exchanging sophomoric barbs while eating lunches that consisted of nothing but hard-boiled eggs and piles of grated cheese.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Loved it beyond all measure as a young man. I tried going back at 35. It was definitely the one that got away.