On your nightstand now:
So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger; Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (which I was reading until I got Enger's book and couldn't put it down); The New Kings of Non-Fiction edited by Ira Glass; A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong; Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Babe Ruth, Baseball Boy. I don't remember the author.
Your top five authors:
This is so hard. I guess my all-time favorites would be James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Ian McEwan. I'd put Joyce on the mound, McEwan at short and the other three in the outfield chasing the deep, lofty drives.
Book you've faked reading:
Finnegans Wake by Joyce. Started and abandoned it twice.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Essential Whitman selected by Galway Kinnell. Whitman has often been my refuge in the worst of times, and this particular selection by Kinnell among the various editions is transcendent.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Cosmic Engineers by Clifford D. Simak, written in 1950. Actually my daughter bought it for me because we are aficionados of a certain type of science fiction. The cover with the lizard man holding a pistol is noteworthy.
Book that changed your life:
Raintree County by Ross Lockridge. Read it in my youth when I was recovering from a knee injury, and somehow it changed everything.
Favorite line from a book:
I'm going with the first line from One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.