On your nightstand now:
What Is the What by Dave Eggers, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman, The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin, The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple (I'm only listing the ones I've read or intend to read--there are guiltier items as well.)
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anything by Enid Blyton, the British children's writer, who kids loved, but schoolteachers loathed ("She'll turn your brain to mush"). I especially liked her Famous Five series. In higher grades, I switched to the British crime noir writer James Hadley Chase--that really got the teachers' hackles up.
Your top five authors:
Oooh. The mathematician in me recoils at that question. "Top" is so ill-defined. My criteria: (1) limit choices to authors with at least two books I've enjoyed. (2) Then base my answer on the single best book I've read by the author, with (3) no weight given to the disappointments: Paul Bowles for The Sheltering Sky, V.S. Naipaul for A House for Mr. Biswas, Kazuo Ishiguro for Never Let Me Go, J.M. Coetzee for Disgrace, Salman Rushdie for Shame.
Book you've faked reading:
The faculty handbook at my university, when I was on a committee to overhaul it.
Book you are an evangelist for:
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I still haven't met anyone who hasn't been completely mesmerized by it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Just about every cookbook I've acquired recently. I've collected so many over the years that I only buy cookbooks now if they have nice pictures.
Book that changed your life:
The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller. I read it while researching The Death of Vishnu and was amazed that its beauty, its spirituality, spoke so eloquently to a hardened agnostic like me. Its 11th chapter became the crucial revelatory point on which my whole novel hinged.
Favorite line from a book:
"….the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above." From The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White. For about six months in the early '90s, I simply read this book again and again every night. It has a mixture of intrigue and possibility and droll charm that never seems to dry out. In fact, I think I'll pick it up again tonight.