On your nightstand now:
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. Haters by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz, both fun YA novels; I have a teenager in my next book, so I've been embracing my inner 15-year-old. The Making of a Marchioness (one of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novels for adults). Home by Marilynne Robinson, which I've been putting off reading, because Gilead is so painfully beautiful that I can't imagine a sequel living up to it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Hands down The Secret Garden, which is still my favorite. My second novel, After You, is, in many ways, a love letter to that book.
Your top five authors:
Is it uncool to say Jane Austen? Also, Richard Powers, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and I have a huge writer crush on Zadie Smith.
Book you've faked reading:
I rarely fake reading--if only because I'm cursed with the inability to lie convincingly--but I've definitely failed to mention not finishing. I made it only three-quarters of the way through War and Peace, but still managed to do a presentation on it in college. Have a feeling my professor hadn't read the whole thing either.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Again, The Secret Garden. Couldn't love it more.
Book you've bought for the cover:
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, because the first page is printed right on the cover. And I dig Eggers.
Book that changed your life:
Any and all of the books from the Nancy Drew series. She taught me that life is a lot more fun if you are curious.
Favorite line from a book:
"Willie and Rose turned out not to be cousins, just how nobody knows, and so they married and had children and sang with them and sometimes singing made Rose cry and sometimes it made Willie get more and more excited and they lived happily ever after and the world just went on being round."--The last line of The World Is Round by Gertrude Stein.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I guess Stein's The World Is Round, which on the cover says "A BOOK for children." Funny, I don't think it's for children at all. Either way, it's pure pleasure to read out loud.
