On your nightstand now:
William Trevor's Love and Summer. British novelists seem to be rediscovering the '50s lately. First Ian McEwan with On Chesil Beach, and earlier this year Colm Toíbín with Brooklyn. I guess repression gives desire the necessary restraint to turn into longing, right? Anyway, now Trevor is resurrecting the period with the story of a woman who has to reconsider everything she knows for a passion that overtakes her. I watched soaps with my mother growing up, so I love melodrama.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Le Petit Prince. I love that he had a tree growing on his tiny moon planet, that he always looked dapper no matter how late he had stayed up, or how far he had travelled. I later discovered Saint-Expery had crashed his plane in the desert, and I loved his book even more for its brave, clear-eyed wisdom.
Your top five authors:
Jack Kerouac, because he wrote Whitman's bardic yawp into the American novel, James Baldwin for his melodrama and his moral seriousness, Virginia Woolf for her intelligence, George Orwell for his anger, and Mahmoud Darwish for the beauty of his longing.
Book you've faked reading:
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. When I first moved to New York in 1996, long after the Odeon was a tourist destination and cocaine was as much of a relic as Don Johnson, my roommates were in love with this book. I didn't feel like I even had to read it--I could simply absorb it through osmosis. I finally finished it years later, and I wished I had read it at the time.
Book you’re an evangelist for:
The Education of Henry Adams. The first modern American memoir, written by the Adams who was too smart to become president. It's a great account of what it is like to live through enormous technological change, so it'll be forever relevant, since I think we always feel like we're witnessing a huge leap forward--that is the nature of technology, to overwhelm us.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The latest Adrian Tomine book. Drawn & Quarterly publish his books beautifully, and as a Sacramento kid, I love watching him draw his own universe.
Book that changed your life:
The Education of Henry Adams. I read this in college the year e-mail became compulsory and felt a kinship with this mind, a hundred years dead, and to think he could do it all with this deeply uncool beard.
Favorite line from a book:
"Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death."--Gravity's Rainbow.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The fury of the writing, the music of it, the sense of being aloft on this great magical strength . . . forgetting myself and anything else in the world. That happens only on a few occasions with reading; after that, no matter how good the book, I worry it is the memory of that first escape that keeps you going, as a reader.