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Kirkland Hamill has written for Salon and the Advocate, and was formerly the chief development and marketing officer at the National Center for Family Philanthropy. He lives in Baltimore, Md., with his husband, Dave, and a dog named Blue. His debut memoir is Filthy Beasts (Avid Reader Press).
On your nightstand now:
I am reading All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I asked my local bookseller, Emma, to recommend an epic story, beautifully written, with rich characters. I was sold when she told me that Robert Penn Warren was also a poet. I think poets make the best novelists. He can write five pages on how the wind is blowing through the trees and I'm right there swaying along with the branches. Having said all that, I love a great, plot-driven story. I have Small Mercies by Eddie Joyce, Canada by Richard Ford and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel on deck. They were also recommendations from my local bookseller.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I guess that would depend on the age. I've forgotten most of what I read before I was a teenager. I remember loving Judy Blume. She was the first adult who actually acknowledged the complexity of being a child, especially as we were trying to make sense of our bodies and the world around us. I loved A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I was the friend who would have jostled the tree branch.
Your top five authors:
John Steinbeck
Mark Helprin
Richard Russo
Toni Morrison
Donna Tartt (The Secret History more than her others, but I finished that book and then started it again from the beginning)
Book you've faked reading:
I'm not much of a faker, unless you count some textbook reading in college after being called on by the professor. I've tried Faulkner, and would love to say that I was sophisticated enough to love him, but he just makes my head hurt. I thought it would be a good idea to read the Bible at some point just to see what all the hubbub was about, but the best I could do was to get a book called How to Read the Bible, and I didn't even read that.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn't realize until way after the fact that it was a YA book, but that hasn't tempered my passion for it. I was crying so hard at the end that I was getting pissed that the tears were impeding my ability to finish it. I'm still trying to figure out how a Holocaust story with Death as the narrator qualifies as a young person's book. It has the best closing line: "I am haunted by humans."
Book you've bought for the cover:
Almost everything in the airport when my flight is being called.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents weren't the kind of people that you had to hide naughty things from. If I had decided to read the Bible, that would have been more scandalous. I do remember once buying a gay erotic novel and hiding that from my whole family. But then again, I would have hidden it from the cashier when I was buying it if I could have.
Book that changed your life:
There are so many books that have changed me a little bit at a time. I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand when I was 19, at the same time I was taking my first philosophy class (I don't recommend the combination). That book changed me for a few months, until I decided I didn't like who it changed me into. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch introduced me to this radical idea that there was no such thing as good or evil, which I believed until recently (November 8, 2016--if you're looking for a precise date). Any author who is talented enough to make me feel like I could be the person experiencing the Holocaust, or becoming the child warrior, or surviving slavery, changes me.
Favorite passage from a book:
"And yet if you asked me what [the truth] was, I can't tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children." --From A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin
Five books you'll never part with:
I'm not one of those people. I give books away. My dog eats them. I can absolutely be floored by a book and then forget about it until I'm reminded.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I want to feel the shocked delight of reading Naked by David Sedaris for the first time.
Five books you loved but haven't mentioned yet:
The Nix by Nathan Hill
This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Road by Cormac McCarthy