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| photo: Cary Hazlegrove | |
Lizi Boyd was given her first desk, Danish modern, when she was 12. Her mother, a potter, filled the top drawer with sketchbooks. This was the beginning of making books. Her children's picture books include Inside Outside, winner of the Please Touch Museum Book Award; Flashlight, winner of a BolognaRagazzi Award and one of NPR's Best Books of the Year; and Big Bear Little Chair (Chronicle, October 6, 2015), a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2015. She lives in Vermont.
On your nightstand now:
I could never fit my reading collection on a nightstand. I have two small trunks, tail to tail, with stacks of books. What's waiting for me: A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson, The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George and Hold Still by Sally Mann. There is also a copy of The Best of It by Kay Ryan. A newish habit: a poem or two or three before bed.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White. This book is worth finding and reading aloud. I was enchanted as a child, and I can still hear Pop's cadence. His voice lives on in these childhood books.
Your top five authors:
This is an impossible question, but here goes from the top of my head: Zora Neale Hurston, E.B. White, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust.
Books you've faked reading:
One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse. I read it but had absolutely no understanding of it. I was trying to impress my eighth-grade English teacher. It was the first and last time I chose a book to impress someone.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Letters on Life by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Ulrich Baer. These are relatively new and unknown translations of Rilke's correspondence and writings. Wherever you open the book, you'll be stirred and embraced.
Book you bought for the cover:
I'm all visual, and I'm often in the bookstore describing the cover, having forgotten the title. The most recent cover that I was taken by: The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits. Julavits turns herself inside out for the reader. It terrified me, but I admired her too.
Book that changed your life:
The Diaries of Paul Klee (1898-1918).
Favorite line from a book:
"Art is childhood." --Rainer Maria Rilke
The five artists you most admire:
Paul Klee, Matisse, Jean Arp, Noguchi, Picasso.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda.
Favorite reading roost:
In bed with so many pillows and plenty of books.
Anywhere with hot sun and lapping water: dreamy, slow book days.