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| photo: Jan Schoelzel | |
On your nightstand now:
Honestly? Crazy from the Heat, the David Lee Roth autobiography. It's for research purposes, I swear.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. I was obsessed with this book for the entirety of my childhood. Not with Alice in Wonderland, though, for some reason. I was a peculiar kid.
Your top five authors:
Five authors I'm in awe of at the moment: Alice Munro, Leanne Shapton, Denis Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Shirley Hazzard.
Book you've faked reading:
I'm reasonably sure that I faked reading every book I was assigned in school between the ages of 12 and 17. I'm not proud of this. I recently sat down and read Heart of Darkness, which I'd faked reading not once but twice. My chagrin when I realized how strange and great it is was pretty deep. I'm embarrassed even as I write this.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Festival of Earthly Delights by Matt Dojny. A hilarious, unclassifiable delight of a book, somewhere between a straightforward narrative and a graphic novel, based on the author's experiences as a very young man working and living in Southeast Asia. The protagonist manages to embarrass himself in just about every way possible. Neck-and-neck with Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse as the funniest novel I've ever read.
Book you've bought for the cover:Someone just showed me a jpeg of the cover for the new Marlon James novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I'd definitely buy that book for its cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Clan of the Cave Bear by J.M. Auel. Remember that book? There are some very dirty bits in that, let me tell you, but you could check it out from the library in my hometown without anyone raising an eyebrow. Libraries are great.
Book that changed your life:
Pretentious as this may sound, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce--another book I faked reading as a teenager. That book has a relationship to the passage of time, both for its characters and for the reader, that I still don't understand. It's supernatural. It's just so beautiful. It made me want to write.
Favorite line from a book:
"His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
That's from another of Joyce's masterpieces, his long short story The Dead. No living writer could get away with a line like that, I don't think. But it gives me the shivers every time I read it.
Five books you'll never part with:
A first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway that I found on the floor of an apartment I was looking at in Brooklyn--the apartment had been gutted, and for some reason that book was left behind. A first edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami that I bought myself when I turned 40, in the wonderful rare book room of Powell's in Portland, Ore. A copy of Shirley Hazzard's perfect novel, The Transit of Venus, that a mutual friend asked her to sign for me shortly before her death. Three crumbling Ballantine paperback volumes of The Lord of the Rings that I read so many times as a kid that they're now just a heap of brittle yellow pages in a drawer of my writing desk. That's six!
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Through the Looking Glass, of course. I read it every year.