Mary Ann Hoberman is a poet and author of many books for
children, including A House Is a House for Me, winner of the National Book
Award. Other titles include The Seven Silly Eaters and the You Read to Me, I'll
Read to You series. In 2008, Hoberman was named Children's Poet Laureate of
America by the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent project is The Tree That Time
Built, an anthology of more than 100 poems celebrating the wonders of the
natural world and encouraging environmental awareness.
On your nightstand now:
Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner, Dr. Thorne by Anthony
Trollope, The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble, Remarkable Creatures
by Sean B. Carroll.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield. As a child during the
Depression, I owned very few books and lived for my Saturday morning visits to
the public library. The rule was that you could renew a book only three times.
But the risk that my beloved Betsy might be checked out by another reader and
kept from me for who knew how long was unbearable. So after I had returned her
for the third time, I would linger about the returned books cart until a
librarian started reshelving them. As soon as Betsy was put in her place among
the C's, I would casually saunter over and, after making sure that no one was
looking, slip her behind the other books. And there she would wait for me all
week, ready to be taken out again and carried home in triumph for another
six-week residency.
Your top five authors:
Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope,
Henry James.
Book you've faked reading:
War and Peace. A lifetime ago, my architect husband was
awarded a traveling fellowship, and we took our young family off to Europe. We
fetched up in Rome, where we spent six months. Not speaking or reading Italian,
I was always on the lookout for books in English. (In those days they were not
so easy to come by.) At one point, I found a fat paperback edition of War and
Peace and plunged into it happily. But my pleasure was short-lived; eventually
I discovered that, despite its heft, what I had in my hands was merely Volume
I. In vain I searched for Volume II. By the time we returned home I was on to other
things, and I never have acquired (or read) the complete book. But whenever it
comes up in conversation, it never occurs to me to qualify my familiarity with
the novel. And now that I am up in years and have trouble remembering even the
books that I have read in their entirety, it probably makes no difference.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. With his detailed
evocation of an idyllic childhood, his invaluable comments on writing, his
exquisite style, this book makes me nostalgic for a world I never knew.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney. The cover of this
large picture book (and the book itself), just out, is remarkable. There is no title or author's name on
the cover, no type at all, only a great tawny lion's face with golden staring
eyes.
Book that changed your life:
Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, 4th
edition, 1930. The beloved book (still sitting in tatters on my bookshelf) that
introduced me to poetry, and its format, with commentary on the poems and
with poets' biographies, served as one of the inspirations for The Tree That
Time Built.
Favorite line from a book:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its
several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."--Charles Darwin, The Origin
of Species
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.
Book you least want to read for the first time:
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.
Book you most want to finish reading before you die (but
probably won't):
Moby Dick by Herman Melville.