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| photo: Earl Wilson/The New York Times | |
Maria Russo rejoined the New York Times Book Review in August as its children's books editor. A native New Yorker, Russo received her Ph.D. in 19th-century American Literature from Columbia University. In addition to editing and publishing children's reviews once a month in the Book Review, Russo writes the Bookshelf column plus a weekly online picture book review. Her children--ages four, eight and 11--keep Russo attuned to books in every age category.
On your nightstand now:
There's something for every age on my nightstand! Or rather on the floor, since when we moved into our apartment this summer, our bed didn't fit in the elevator, and we're still sleeping on just the mattress. There are picture books I've been reading to my four-year-old son: Brian Floca's Five Trucks; Greg Pizzoli's Number One Sam; Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett's Sam and Dave Dig a Hole; one well-worn Emily Jenkins picture book called My Favorite Thing; two of Lucy Cousins's Maisie books; and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Then there's The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang, a graphic novel that my eight-year-old son just finished. There's a YA novel from earlier this year that I'm catching up with, Laurie Halse Anderson's heartbreaking The Impossible Knife of Memory. And there are grown-up books that these days are like a chocolate bar I keep in the fridge and sneak bites from. Having just come back to New York after 10 years in California, I've been gravitating to books about the city. There's Boris Fishman's A Replacement Life, a fantastically funny, smart take on immigrant travails of the Brooklyn Russian-Jewish variety. And Don DeLillo's Underworld. I wanted to re-read the scenes set in the Italian-American Bronx.
Favorite books when you were a child:
I adored the Little House on the Prairie books--the wilderness setting, the danger and adventure and the feeling that life was a constant process of reinventing everything from scratch, of working hard to make possible some brief moment of celebration or coziness or even just safety. But I also loved books that were set in New York City, where I lived, for many of the same reasons: they are all struggle, struggle, struggle, then exhilaration. Then back to struggle. I became especially attached to The Cricket in Times Square. I felt Chester's dilemma like an ache: return to the country or stay in Times Square? (I still feel it!) A little later there was another book that really stayed with me called Nilda, by a writer named Nicholasa Mohr, who was a pioneering Latina voice in the 1970s, though of course I had no idea about that at the time. I just found it in the local library. It was about a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s, and there was something magical about the writing, how it captured a kind of day-to-day urban life, the harshness of it but also the deep emotions of this girl trying to inhabit the beauty of life as best she could, where she was.
Your top five authors:
Herman Melville. Emily Dickinson. Edith Wharton. Don DeLillo. Milan Kundera.
Book you've faked reading:
I am terrible at that! I usually turn red and clam up when something comes up that I know I should have read, but didn't. Which by the way includes both War and Peace and Lord of the Rings.
Book you're an evangelist for:
With children's books, it's Wonder by R. J. Palacio. If I learn that anyone I know has a child between the ages of eight and 12 who has not yet read it, I feel that I must step in there. For grown-up books, I'm always shocked when someone tells me they haven't read Pat Barker's Regeneration World War I trilogy. I act as though it's a grave wrong that must be righted immediately.
Book you've bought for the cover:
There's a board book version of Margaret Wise Brown's wonderfully weird Little Fur Family that has an oval of actual (fake) fur on the cover, right on the belly of Garth Williams's illustration of the "fur child." Now that's an alluring cover. I like to buy it as a baby gift.
Book that changed your life:
Harriet the Spy, another New York City childhood book. With that one not only did I identify, I was galvanized. Naturally I started a spy diary chronicling life in my own 1970s oddball-filled apartment building. It planted in me the idea that close observation and writing are a way to get through.
Favorite line from a book:
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/ Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura." The opening lines of Dante's Inferno: "In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark woods." I find so much comfort in that "nostra vita"--"our life."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Forever by Judy Blume. Probably nothing has ever compared to the relief and the thrill of finally finding out not just that this is exactly how it happens, but also that it will be not just okay, but much, much more than okay.