After receiving B.A. degrees in psychology and English literature from Lake Forest College, Jacqueline Carey took part in a work exchange program and spent six months working in a bookstore in London. When she returned, she began her writing career and is the author of the Kushiel's Legacy series of historical fantasy novels, The Sundering epic fantasy duology and the postmodern fables Santa Olivia and the new Saints Astray (Grand Central, November 22, 2011). Carey lives in western Michigan.
On your nightstand now:
Once Upon a River by fellow Michigander Bonnie Jo Campbell. Yes, we really do call ourselves Michiganders.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Watership Down. It was the last book my mother read aloud to my brothers and me when we were kids. It took weeks, and as soon as she finished, I snatched it from her hands so I could read it over for myself. I spent a lot of time trying in vain to communicate with wild rabbits that year.
Your top five authors:
I tend to have top books rather than authors, but to choose across a wide spectrum, Mary Renault and Robert Graves for historical fiction, John Steinbeck for modern literature, Guy Gavriel Kay for fantasy and Dennis Lehane for gritty contemporary novels.
Book you've faked reading:
Everything by Jane Austen. It's embarrassing to admit it, but try as I might, I just don't enjoy her work.
Book you're an evangelist for:
One of my favorite books, The Horse of Selene by Irish gypsy author Juanita Casey. It's lyrical, mythopoetic, gorgeous, tragic and undeservedly obscure.
Book you've bought for the cover:
None! But if library books count, I checked out Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them for the cover. The image of a little girl in a white dress running pell-mell down a sunlit road could be charming in another context, but knowing that this is a collection of harrowing stories about children in war-torn regions of Africa imbues it with horror.
Book that changed your life:
It would have to be my debut novel, Kushiel's Dart. I'd been an unpublished struggling writer for 10 years and had written several "practice novels." In creative and professional terms, this was my breakthrough book, and it quite literally changed my life. I may have felt that way about, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the time (I was a teenager, okay?), but this change is concrete and, I hope, lasting.
Favorite line from a book:
Since evangelizing was mentioned, here's one from The Horse of Selene describing the braying, crowing cacophony that greets the dawn on a fictional Irish island:
"Cockerels, waiting until the ass competition was ended, saluted the dawn, the island, their wives and particularly themselves, and like the rest of the inhabitants, went back to sleep again."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Little, Big by John Crowley. It's a multigenerational deconstructed fairy tale, and part of the pleasure is the gradual reveal of how the disparate pieces of the literary puzzle come together to form the story's gestalt.