On your nightstand now:
I've got books piled up all over the house--I drive my wife nuts leaving them everywhere and have four or five going at all times. Right now I'm re-reading Tolstoy's short novel The Cossacks; a biography of Camus called Camus: A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes; Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy by Helen Luke; and I read a little each night from a new translation of the Bible by Eugene Peterson, checking it against the New International Version translation.
Favorite book when you were a child:
When I was really young I loved On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss. When I was a middle-schooler it was C.S. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower. I really identified with Hornblower's shyness and social awkwardness while at the same time imagining myself being a brilliant hero.
Your top five authors:
The two that don't ever leave the list are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Tolstoy can make memorable characters out of horses and Dostoevsky can keep me up wandering streets late at night with the big questions. The rest of the list probably changes based on my mood, but right now one would be J.D. Salinger. I've read Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories many times and never tire of them. I love Simenon's Inspector Maigret stories. Not only do they transport me to France, but they cover so much time that they transport me to different decades in France. I reach for the poetry of A.E. Housman and W.B. Yeats pretty frequently.
Book you've faked reading:
Finnegans Wake. I once heard a hotshot English literature academic say that unless you come to terms with Finnegans Wake, you'll never be a writer. Since I'm a writer, coming to terms must have meant giving up. But it did sit in a prominent place in my house for several years, hopefully giving the illusion to people who didn't know me very well that I was actually reading it. I even read several books about Finnegans Wake, like Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, and got through them fine. Maybe the other aspect of coming to terms with the book was realizing that I'm just not smart enough to keep up with Joyce. I sometimes wonder if that professor was either.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I'm really excited about Lily King's Father of the Rain, which is coming out in July. She writes about father-daughter love and what psychologists call "father hunger"--the longing and emptiness felt by people whose fathers were either physically or emotionally absent--in a way that gripped me right through the book. There are probably more people suffering from father hunger than from war trauma.
Book you've bought for the cover:
That's a great question. I think I've probably bought magazines for the cover but I honestly don't think I've ever bought a book for the cover. But I do remember going in to see The Graduate on the strength of that picture of Dustin Hoffman looking at Anne Bancroft putting on her stockings.
Book that changed your life:
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by C.G. Jung. When I was a kid, I had some really weird experiences that verged on the spiritual. I don't want to talk about it too much, because it's hard to explain, but this book helped me make sense of them. I'm a Catholic, but reading Jung really changed how I interpret the mass and the religious symbols of the church.
Favorite line from a book:
"A little tap on the windowpane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain."--Proust, Swann's Way. I grew up on the Oregon coast. Enough said.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Lord of the Rings. I read it when I was a sophomore in college. I skipped all of my classes and sustained myself on pizza and short naps until I finished it.
