Favorite book when you were a child:
Tie: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard. Some of my own characters could be the unlikely children of Sara Crewe (seeking redemption with hopefulness and faith) and Conan (inexorable and often violent pragmatism), so I suppose I have never abandoned these first literary loves.
Your top five authors:
Frank Turner Hollon, Haven Kimmel, Sara Gruen, Dennis Lehane, Cornelia Read.
Book you've faked reading:
I once wrote a 10-page paper on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and yet I never even cracked it... oh, the wash of residual shame!
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker.
Most humiliating readerly confession:
After I read Ian McEwan's Atonement, I flipped it shut and thought, "What a nice book. A little cheery and tidy for McEwan, I s'pose, but whatever...." I skipped the Author's Note that I assumed marketing had tacked onto the end. A couple of years later, looking for some sweet and soothing reading for a long plane ride, I grabbed Atonement. Halfway through the flight, I reached the "end" of the book and realized the "Author's Note" was actually a final chapter. I had never read the end of the novel! I flipped the page and the whole book reversed and brilliantly fell in on itself and destroyed me. I sobbed my guts out like a natural born fool all the way over Nevada, and then had to sit there sniffling damply between two seatmates who were reading OK magazine and nothing, respectively, and who clearly thought I was a loon.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Bound South by Susan Rebecca White. It's a woman carrying very proper pumps as she scampers (quite improperly) barefoot across a tidy, manicured lawn. The image implies swift movement in subversive and unconventional directions.
Book you wish you had written:
Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott. It reads like a juicy novel, but it's meticulously researched history. I can't do that--three paragraphs in, I would U-turn away from truth and take the characters haring off in my own direction. Novelists are such inveterate liars....
Book you've bought for the title:
Eating the Cheshire Cat by Helen Ellis. I stood there in the bookstore wondering, "How does one eat something with a mouth that big, before it eats you?" To my intense pleasure, the book answers that question on the thematic level.
Book that changed your life:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and I bet it changed yours, too.
Favorite line from a book:
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
I love this piece of dialogue from Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find so much I had the narrator of Backseat Saints, who feels an odd kinship with both O'Connor and the Misfit's idea of redemption, quote it.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It unfolds so perfectly, and I wish I could read the beginning again, not knowing the end.
