On your nightstand now:
The Pope's Rhinoceros by Laurence Norfolk is sitting on my nightstand; however, this is kind of meaningless as I'm not actually sleeping in my own bed. I'm currently on the road promoting my own book, so I brought a "petting zoo library" with me, containing smaller volumes and short stories I can pick up and put down as time permits. I'm currently enjoying a deliciously dark sliver of French fiction entitled Happy Days by Laurent Graff, and am dipping in and out of The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved Winnie the Pooh so much I wanted to move to the Hundred Acre Wood.... which is probably why I now live in a remote coastal forest in Tasmania.
Your top five authors:
Philip Roth, Douglas Adams, George McDonald Fraser, Woody Allen and Gerald Durrell feature in my private pantheon of comic gods who know how to make my brain convulse like an epileptic jellyfish. Davids, Eggers and Sedaris do it for me as well.
Book you've faked reading:
I have actually genuinely enjoyed every volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time; aka A la Recherche du Temps Perdu), but on several occasions I have pretended to have read it in the original French. In fact, I often pretend to be able to speak French, which I don't, and that's not all. One time, in Tokyo, I pretended I could speak fluent Japanese. Boy, that was a loooong two weeks.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I was dazzled by the poetic athleticism of Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, but mostly I shill for Genius by James Gleick. A wonderful book about a truly extraordinary mind. Genius actually motivated me to visit all the universities where Professor Richard Feynman studied or taught during his brief but brilliant life. Yes, it's true, I am a total geek-groupie.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Pretty much every volume in the Faber & Faber poetry series, plus Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, even though I had nowhere to put it. I must confess, Dian Hansen's Big Book of Breasts also turned my head, but I knew that if I owned such a book I would have to conceal the cover with sackcloth lest my closet Lutheran self-loathing consume me from the inside out, so I passed.
Book that changed your life:
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. The first book to make me laugh out aloud. And frankly, the book that inspired both my entire career and a lifetime of wild adventure. I also blame Durrell for my five emergency treatments for rabid bat and monkey bites.
Favorite line from a book:
I loved the breakfast scene from Moby-Dick where huge, heroic, muscle-bound harpooners gather quietly to eat in shy silence: "A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!"
Favorite line from your own book:
"But not all cat lovers are pudgy, masochistic loners who lack the energy and self-respect to have a dog. Some are simply evil."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Alexandria Quartet. You never forget your first unreliable narrator.
Best literary facial hair:
The best bookish beardy types would have to be Edward Lear, Herman Melville and Edward Gorey. Magnificent moustache status awarded to William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein.
Book you would use to kill a spider or a snake:
For spiders you'd have to employ William Golding's Lord of the Flies and enjoy the irony. But for snakes, muggers, malevolent giant squid and so on, Ted Hughes: Collected Poems would be my first choice. It has plenty of heft, which is vital for cracking skulls but, more importantly, if the tragic deaths of Sylvia Plath, Assia and Shura Wevvil and Nicholas Hughes have taught us anything, it is that Ted Hughes's words are dangerous weapons.
Best book to read when drunk:
The only responsible choice would be a book that highlights road safety, and the most entertaining example I know of is Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems.
Author you'd least like to see naked:
Ewwww--this is something that has concerned me whenever champagne-soaked literary festival dinners spiral out of control. It would have to be a tie between Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie. Especially if they were together on a water slide or frolicking in a fountain. Gross!
Authors you would most like to see fight it out in the ring:
Norman Mailer versus Anne Frank. Norman loves to talk about his pugilistic prowess, but I never believed he could back this up. Anne Frank, on the other hand, had true inner strength and was very light on her feet. Anne Frank to win by TKO in the sixth.
Book that surprised you the most:
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (originally titled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships). The plethora of sweet children's tales about Lilliput had simply not prepared me for how wonderfully witty and wicked the original satire was.
Favorite literary character:
I keep hoping Edward Gorey's "doubtful guest" will bumble into my home. Robert Jordan, Hemingway's typically understated guerrilla hero from For Whom the Bell Tolls always came to mind during my paratrooper years, and lives on in the tangy aftertaste of goat cheese to this very day. And, unfortunately for all concerned, it is impossible for me to read Harold Bloom without hearing the voice of the fatuous and salacious Baron de Charlus, from Marcel Proust's exquisitely detailed French epic.
Book no one should put off reading:
Moby-Dick. It truly is a masterpiece. A wondrous voyage in itself.
Book no one should ever read:
Ulysses by James Joyce. Yes, it contains rapturous passages of delirious dream music. But mostly it is liquid gibberish garnished with a little piece of poop.
Famous author you are often mistaken for or compared to:
My unrelenting celebration of human frailty is obviously Proustian, but from the back I look exactly like Goethe wearing an moth-eaten woollen cap. Everybody says so.