On your nightstand now:
My shiny new Kindle. Does that count? I swore I'd never get one, but then I realized that most of my traveling luggage was hardcover books. At the moment, I'm re-reading the essays of David Foster Wallace, which are even more brilliant than I remember. The only problem is that I've now started to insert unnecessary footnotes into everything, including e-mail.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Everything by Bill Peet.
Your top five authors:
An obviously impossible question. But here it goes: John Updike, Saul Bellow, Primo Levi, Borges and Virginia Woolf.
Book you've faked reading:
The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Waves. I'm pretty shameless, no? But you really should read it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The collected works of Italo Calvino. I feel smarter just having them on my bookshelf.
Book that changed your life:
Which books haven't changed my life? But The Periodic Table by Primo Levi was one of those books that made me want to write about science.
Favorite line from a book:
Here's Levi, writing about carbon as the essential atom of life: "Carbon is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yesses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Rabbit series by Updike. I want to start it again without knowing the end.