Lori Andrews is the author of Immunity, published by St. Martins/Minotaur this month, The Silent Assassin (2007) and Sequence (2006), thrillers involving Dr. Alexandra ("Alex") Blake, a geneticist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Andrews has written 10 nonfiction books and was described by the American Bar Association Journal in 2008 as a "newsmaker of the year--a lawyer with a literary twist and the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator." Her website is loriandrews.com.
On your nightstand now:
Five Stories by J.D. Salinger, On The Road by Jack Kerouac (the reissued version as he originally wrote it before his editor added 2,000 commas) and swag from Thrillerfest--the advance readers copy of Katherine Neville's The Fire, her lustrous sequel to The Eight.
Favorite book when you were a child:
In junior high, I worked in my dad's drugstore. When the customers thinned out, I would pick up paperbacks from the revolving rack and read a dozen pages or so of each (if I read more than that, it would crack the spine and the book wouldn't look new anymore). Consequently I've read a small section of every pulp novel of the late 1960s and managed to merge them together in my head. As a result, by the time I reached college, I gravitated to books like Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, with its 155 chapters. You can read it straight through or follow Cortazar's instructions by reading the chapters in a different order. Even better was Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, a novel where the pages come unbound in a box so you can shuffle them and read them in any order.
Your top five authors:
I love mysteries and thrillers! Arturo Perez-Reverte, Robert K. Tanenbaum, Scott Turow, Sara Paretsky and Jeffery Deaver.
Book you've faked reading:
Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Okay, sometimes a cigar is NOT a cigar. Why read the book?
Book you're an evangelist for:
After a research trip to Vietnam in 2007 for my novel The Silent Assassin, I read--and was blown away by--Michael Herr's Dispatches, his trippy, powerful, literary coverage of the Vietnam War for Esquire. The book served as the basis for the movies Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time."
Book you've bought for the cover:
In the Shakespeare aisle, I saw a book with a graphically beautiful cover. In large type it said, "Kenneth Branagh," and under that, Hamlet. In small type below the title, it said, "by William Shakespeare." I couldn't help but marvel at the audacity of Branagh giving himself top billing for the screenplay of Hamlet. I'm looking forward to publishing Lori Andrews's Crime and Punishment. ("Yeah, Fyodor and I were just tossing back vodkas one night and I came up with this great idea for a book about a destitute student and a miserly pawnbroker and, like, the book practically wrote itself.")
Book that changed your life:
Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism. Not only did it launch a new writing style--creative nonfiction--but it offered great life advice. He compared staying in graduate school with "the worst part of the worst Antonioni movie you ever saw"--giving people the okay to bail out of situations they detested. I read the book, skipped a law school class, and talked my way into a writing assignment for New York magazine.
Favorite line from a book:
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."--Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Joan Didion's The White Album for her ability to be both an observer and participant in popular culture. Also, William Styron's Sophie's Choice and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Which contemporary author would you like to have dinner with?
Michael Crichton.