On your nightstand now:
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and advance reading copies of Saul Bellow's Letters and The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (a history of cancer).
Favorite book when you were a child:
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
Your top five authors:
Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow.
Book you've faked reading:
I don't fake reading books.
Book you are an evangelist for:
The Artie Cohen thrillers of my friend Reggie Nadelson. (Latest title: Body Count.) Most underrated thriller writer in America.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Only art books: about Magritte, Picasso, Clemente, dozens of painters.
Book that changed your life:
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
Favorite line from a book:
"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." --Ulysses, James Joyce
or, maybe,
"In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid."--Joseph Heller, Something Happened.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez