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| photo: Sonya Sones | |
Mac Barnett is an excellent communicator, as his new book, Telephone (Chronicle, October), attests. His message--in this case, "It's time for dinner"--gets through loudly and clearly to kids. His book Extra Yarn, illustrated by his friend Jon Klassen, won a Caldecott Honor, and Battle Bunny, co-authored with Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Matthew Myers, broke the boundaries of bookmaking. Here he discusses the reading habits that led to his upturned nightstand.
On your nightstand now:
I recently returned from a book tour to find my nightstand collapsed under the weight of books. I improvised something sturdier and things are okay now.
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Favorite book when you were a child:
Over the course of my childhood I think it probably went from The Monster at the End of This Book to The Stupids Step Out to Frog and Toad Are Friends to The Phantom Tollbooth to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Your top five authors:
Oh, brother. Franz Kafka, Margaret Wise Brown, Russell Hoban, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, I guess. I'm bad at picking favorites.
Book you've faked reading:
Hmm. I don't really do this!
Book you're an evangelist for:
Isol's It's Useful to Have a Duck. It's a perfect board book. I'm an evangelist for Isol generally. She is one of the greatest picture-book makers alive right now.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I buy a lot of books for their covers. Picture books can and should be judged by their covers. And I judge novels by their covers, too, whether that's fair or not. I bought The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov for its cover. You can see it in that photo of the wrecked nightstand, partially obscured by that book of nursery rhymes, which has a pretty good cover itself, actually. A frog in a waistcoat! Now I feel like Burl Ives.
Book that changed your life:
Well, The Stinky Cheese Man changed my life dramatically--reading it in college made me want to write picture books. But I'm changed by a lot of the books I read, even the bad ones. In the last year or so, my life's been subtly but measurably altered by Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Yusef Komunyakaa's The Chameleon Couch and Cece Bell's El Deafo. None of those are the bad ones, by the way--they're all terrific.
Favorite line from a book:
The sentence I probably think about more than any other is from the catechism section of Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus go out into the night:
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
That's two sentences. It's the second one that I think about a lot, but it needs the first one to really sing. I love it. "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." The image is immediately apprehensible, but it's also completely surprising. The expected thing would be to make the night sky the tree and the stars the fruit. Joyce does the opposite, and he's right, and when I first read it I realized that lesser writers' lazy lyricism had made me see the world backwards.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Probably Lonesome Dove. I know I already mentioned it above. This was a good chance to introduce a new book to the conversation, and I blew it. I apologize to everyone.