Annie Barrows, co-author with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, is also the author of the children's series Ivy and Bean as well as The Magic Half. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was just published by the Dial Press.
On your nightstand now:
Now and for the last eight years my nightstand has sported volume one of Samuel Pepys's diary. I've given up on reading the darn thing because I can't make my way through the introduction (Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board--huh?), but I like the look of Samuel's lumpy face there next to my bed. He's my own personal 17th-century dream-catcher. Lying across Samuel's clavicle is the book I am actually reading right now, W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Little Women. I read it hundreds of times; in fact, I can still recite the first page from memory. The first time I read the book, I was only seven and I didn't understand that the words "she went out with tide" meant that Beth had died. I thought it was a pretty funny time for her to be going on vacation.
Your top five authors:
Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Book you've faked reading:
For a long time, I pretended I had read Remembrance of Things Past. Then I read it. I should have kept on pretending.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. This is an account of how the author escaped from a Soviet prison camp during World War II by walking to India. It's absolutely astonishing. You'll never complain again.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I bought a three-volume edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for its spines. The spine of volume one shows two proud Corinthian columns in gold. On volume two, the columns are cracking, and there's a chunk out of one of the pediments. By volume three, the poor columns are stumps, declined and fallen.
Book that changed your life:
This is a very embarrassing question. The Catcher in the Rye. That's all I'm going to say about that. If I had any dignity at all, I'd lie.
Favorite line from a book:
"But how could it be true, Sir?" said Peter.
"Why do you say that?" asked the Professor.
"Well, for one thing," said Peter, "if it was real why doesn't everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn't pretend there was."
"What has that to do with it?" said the Professor.
"Well, Sir, if things are real, they're there all the time."
"Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.
--From The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
When I was 19, I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled out at once. The dentist plied me with drugs, and as a result, I lost all self-control and read every single Jane Austen novel in three days. I had been planning to eke them out, one a decade, to give me something to live for, but no--I succumbed to frenzy and blew it all. My only hope is that there will be more Jane Austen in the afterlife.