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| photo: James Cham | |
Yangsze Choo's debut novel, The Ghost Bride (Morrow, August 6, 2013), is a B&N Fall 2013 Discover Great New Writers pick, an August Indie Next List selection and the Bookseller Editor's Pick. Born in Malaysia, Choo lives with her husband and children in Palo Alto, Calif., where she eats and reads too much and can be found writing about both at her blog.
On your nightstand now:
Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, about hilarious mishaps with animals and relatives. Oh, and James Herriot. You can see a theme here.
Your top five authors:
Hard to choose... how about Haruki Murakami, Isak Dinesen, Yukio Mishima, Vikram Seth and Susanna Clarke.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby Dick. I never got further than the bit in the beginning about ordering chowder. I think they had fish and clam chowder and all sorts of other New England cuisine. At that point, I inevitably started to feel hungry and wandered off.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf--no, this isn't a zombie/monster thriller. It's actually an incredibly funny, biting satire about the Russian oligarchy and the oil industry by Viktor Pelevin. I've tried telling people about this, but the words "satire" and "oligarchy" seem to put them off for some reason....
Book you've bought for the cover:
Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red. This actually turned out to be one of my favorite books, rich with layers of unfolding intrigue. In fact, the other day I was trying to squeeze more books into my double-parked bookcase when I picked this one up to reshelf and lost an extra 45 minutes rereading bits of it.
Book that changed your life:
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. I think I have almost all his books in physical form, but I especially love this one. His simple, direct style taught me that a story doesn't need any frills to be completely addictive.
Favorite line from a book:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." A short sentence that nonchalantly assumes the reader buys into Tolkien's world. And of course, it can only refer to the One book.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I was sad to get to the end even though I almost got a hernia toting this hefty book around. Her footnotes, in particular, break almost every rule about footnotes for fiction, yet are so strange and winsome that I was completely charmed.
It sounds like you have a lot of books if you need to double-park them:
I'm addicted to books and start feeling panicky if I'm traveling and there's no reading material. If I don't have anything, I'll start desperately reading real estate circulars and the backs of cereal boxes. The last time I went home on a long flight to Malaysia I solved this by downloading all the Game of Thrones books onto my Kindle. I have no recollection of the next month other than that I spent every spare moment reading them, only to discover at the end that "Nooo! It's not finished!!"