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| photo: Michael Brandt | |
On your nightstand now:
I'm alternating between two historical novels in my e-reader book pile. I'm finishing up Catherine Tucker's Tall Cotton, a thriller set in civil-rights era Lowell, Miss. The author is from Leland, Miss., which also happens to be the town where my mother grew up. I also started on Mingmei Yip's Peach Blossom Pavillion. This fictional account of a girl trafficked into sex work in early 20th-century Shanghai puts one in the mind of a Chinese version of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.
Favorite book when you were a child:
This is a difficult question, when so many stories gave me so much joy as a child. One of the ones I remember best is the 1950s British fantasy classic The Borrowers series by Mary Norton. These novels satisfied my hunger for stories that endured beyond a single book. The five-book series follows the adventures of a colony of miniature people who've taken up residence inside the walls. They subsist by harvesting scraps from the household's "human beans"--teacups, hat pins, thread, thimbles.
Your top five authors:
In literary fiction, I greatly admire the works of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In crime fiction, I've devoured every one of Sara Paretsky's 22 (and counting) novels featuring working-class Chicago private investigator, V.I. Warshawski. The futuristic and historic science fiction Octavia Butler weaves in her writing gives me life.
Book you've faked reading:
I'm sure there were works of assigned readings I merely skimmed as a student, but generally if I don't like a book, I stop reading. I'm a bit squeamish when it comes to gore and extreme horror, so I couldn't get past the first chapter of Zone One, Colson Whitehead's futuristic zombie novel. I'll probably brace myself and finish it one of these days.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I'm such a fan of Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks. The mystical moose hunt is one of my favorite scenes in all literature.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I was mesmerized by the original cover of Octavia Butler's historical novel Kindred. It features the distorted mirror images of the same Black woman, one of them in modern dress, the other in slave-era garb. The hourglass placed between them is a symbol of the time travel element in this iconic novel.
Book you hid from your parents:
Luckily my parents never censored my reading materials. I did hide an LP of The Last Poets back in the day, because I knew my mother would never approve of all that cussing.
Book that changed your life:
I continually revisit W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk for its groundbreaking analysis of the sociological concept of double consciousness. "One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Favorite line from a book:
The scene is from Toni Morrison's Beloved. Lay preacher and spiritual healer Baby Suggs preaches a sermon in the wilderness to a community of the recently enslaved: "Here... in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass."
Five books you'll never part with:
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Another Country by James Baldwin
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Valerie Smith, et al.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I encountered Virginia Hamilton's The People Could Fly, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, when my children were very young. I've always been impressed with this vivid retelling of a classic African American folktale from the Gullah Geechee experience of the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, and North Florida.
Authors you feel you are following in the tradition of:
I count myself fortunate to follow in the tradition of writers like Rudolfo Anaya, Sherman Alexie, Rita Mae Brown, and Valerie Wilson Wesley--authors who ably traverse the permeable boundaries between literary and crime fiction.