Mark Siegel has illustrated several picture books, including the Texas Bluebonnet winner Seadogs and the Sibert Honor Book To Dance, written by his wife, Siena. His recent Boogie Knights (Atheneum, 2008) was optioned by Dreamworks Feature Animation. Siegal is also editorial director of First Second Books, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan. First Second is dedicated to high-quality graphic novels for eve
ry age; among them are Printz winner and National Book Award-nominee American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and the bestseller The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert.
On your nightstand now:
The Pixar Touch by Howard A. Price; Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Clifford Simak's City sent me writing short stories about talking dogs for most of my sixth-grade year; Inside Outside Upside Down by the Berenstains, much earlier of course. It did something to me, though I can't say what. I couldn't seem to get enough of that one. And there was an Uncle Scrooge comic that I read in French, in which the inventor-bird-guy (what's his name?) made a special paint which allowed you to walk into the paintings once they were done. I must have returned to that issue a hundred times. Don't know what it was even called anymore. The art must have been by Carl Barks.
Your top five authors:
(From among those I'm not editing!) Gene Wolfe, Peggy Rathmann, Lawrence Wright, David Mazzuchelli, Franςois Cheng.
Book you've faked reading:
Sin City by Frank Miller.
Books you're an evangelist for:
The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar, one of the most wonderful graphic novels of all; Doris Lessing's visionary science fiction novels, especially Shikasta; The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Tale of the Unknown Island by Jose Saramago.
Book that changed your life:
Why is this question so hard to answer? I suppose some books had a direct application to my life, like Stephen King's memoir On Writing, which surprised me with its passion and discipline for the craft. Some of the comics by the French visionary Moebius certainly left an indelible mark on my mind, especially the Edena series. Paul Auster's Red Notebook became a companion for many years.
Favorite line from a book:
From Orwell's Animal Farm, the last line: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Amin Maalouf's The Gardens of Light, about a little-known prophet called Mani, the only messiah I know of who was an artist.