On your nightstand now:
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. I'm reading it to my daughter, Lotte. It's astonishing to see that although the English language has changed radically in 80 years, the fundamentals of plot and narrative, the things that delight children, haven't changed a bit.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Seriously. My mother gave it to me when I was 10 and I loved it. (I was a childhood freak)
Your top five authors:
Oh, this changes all the time, and I'd hate to be absolute about it, but let's say: Thomas Harris, John Updike, Karin Slaughter to kick off. Ian McEwan deservedly walks off with a top literary prize pretty much every year, but you could equally stick red foil on his covers and stack them high in airport outlets. And Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country is the most atmospheric novel ever written. Ever.
Book you've faked reading:
While staying with my brother at our father's farmhouse in the south of France, we had a competition to see who could read the most of Ulysses before he/she lost the will to live. I won at 96 pages. Victorious, I threw the book out of the window and nearly killed the neighbor, who'd been in dispute with my father for years over a boundary. Sorry, I'm a heathen, but I believe nearly killing that irritating git was the greatest contribution Ulysses ever made to the human race.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The "voice" in a work of fiction is such a delicate thing--one's belief in it can be damaged so easily. Nothing threatens that trust more than knowing too much about the author. For example, Arthur Golden's photograph on the cover of Memoirs of a Geisha destroyed the beauty of the geisha's voice for me. Sadly, modern publishing invites this--it demands a writer is as much a commodity as the book itself. For this, I blame Dickens who popularized the idea of personal appearances by authors. When "Inger Ash Wolfe," already published under a different name, published The Calling and refused to identify herself or make public appearances, the book world turned its back on one of the best thrillers written this year. So that would be the title I'd have to be preachy about. Not just because it's a damned good read, but because of what its publication experience says about the current book publishing/buying climate.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Any of Joanne Harris's books.
Book that changed your life:
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. It proved it was possible to create a fast-paced twisty thriller with all the finesse and grace of a top literary writer.
Favorite line from a book:
The opening line of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." Woah. Now there's a sentence that does the work of an army in terms of plot and characterization and pacing.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Lord of the Rings. I'm not a 16-year-old boy, but whenever I see a new hillside or plain or town I view it through Tolkien eyes and see ringwraiths and dwarfs waiting in the shadows.
