Sara Miles is a former restaurant cook, political reporter and war correspondent. She is the author of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion and the new Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, published last month by Jossey-Bass. She's the founder and director of the Food Pantry in San Francisco, a farmer's market run by poor people that gives away fresh produce and groceries to 600 hungry families a week.
On your nightstand now:
Bits and pieces of Panorama, the special-edition "newspaper" from McSweeney's; Methland by Nick Reding; The Case for God by Karen Armstrong; Learning to Drive by Katha Pollit; R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis and far too many bulb catalogues.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anything by my mother, Betty Miles, especially What Is the World.
Your top five authors:
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor.
Book you've faked reading:
Leviticus.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Salvation on Sand Mountain by Denis Covington, about snakehandlers.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Old World and its Gifts, a social studies textbook from the 1920s.
Book that changed your life:
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich.
Favorite line from a book:
"Yes, I do: I like that hat, I like your party hat!"--From Go, Dog, Go by P.D. Eastman.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Mating by Norman Rush. Unbelievably witty line by line, over its entire wild epic length. A novel with the smartest female narrator ever invented by a man (or, for that matter, by a woman.) Sharply political, deeply moving and utterly hilarious.
