Sure, I’ll Play
1) Which book has been on your shelves the longest?
The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles. I read this when I was way too young to understand it, but that didn’t make the book—or the band—seem less important. Also some Ramona Quimby books but those just remind me not to squeeze an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink because your mother will scoop it into a plastic baggie and you’ll have to dip your toothbrush in it for all eternity.
2) What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?
Current: Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Last: Small World by Matt Beaumont
Next: Either Drink This: Wine Made Simple by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl or Cornflakes With John Lennon by Robert Hilburn.
3) What book did everyone like and you hated?
The Lovely Bones. My first—and only—experience with an office book club. It made everyone else in the group turn into a giant weeping ovary. It made me think it was OK to eat an entire tray of finger sandwiches, since the murder of a schoolgirl seemed to kill the other womens’ appetites.
4) Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?
Anything by Jane Austen that isn’t a remix featuring zombies, sea monsters or other fetid creatures.
5) Which book are you saving for “retirement?
The ones that would’ve taught me how to save money for retirement.
6) Last page: read it first or wait till the end?
Wait until the end. That’s why it’s the last page, you knob.
7) Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?
I rarely read them, but fully expect all of my readers to google everyone I’ve thanked when my first book is published.
8) Which book character would you switch places with?
Philip Marlowe. Or one of the Three Investigators.
9) Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?
There are stacks of books that make me think about being fourteen and wrapped in a beach towel, reading on the deck of my parents’ house until it got too dark to see. Or until the mosquitos came out, either way.
10) Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.
I found a copy of one of the many Transcendental Meditation books by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi beside a discarded mattress and a sack of garbage on a curb in Hamilton, Bermuda. My mother made me put it back though, probably because she assumed that the only reason a person would abandon their bed AND their religion on the same day was because they were teeming with disease.
11) Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?
Rue McClanahan signed her autobiography, My First Five Husbands…And The Ones Who Got Away, for my then-pregnant former college roommate. Ms. McClanahan inscribed it “Name the baby Blanche!”
12) Which book has been with you to the most places?
Mark Twain’s Following the Equator came with me on an Armed Forces Entertainment tour of Alaska and the South Pacific (Guam and the Marshall Islands) because everyone knows that Fairbanks sits directly on the equator.
13) Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?
I’m not sure I’ve re-read anything that was shoved into my hands in high school. Sorry, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I know how hurt you must be.
14) What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?
A ticket stub from a late-90s Jazz Butcher concert in Los Angeles.
15) Used or brand new?
Either way. Just like my men. Wait…what?
16) Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?
If his name was on the spine of the book, I checked it out of the library when I was in junior high. I love his short stories, finding lots of them more unsettling than his full-length works. I think Bag of Bones may have been the last of his books I attempted to read, so I’m content to remember him as he was: the man I’d least like to be my father. “Hey kids, want to hear a bedtime story?” Hell no. But I would like you to make this washing machine stop eating the neighbors.
17) Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?
High Fidelity probably comes the closest.
18) Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?
The Cat in the Hat.
19) Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?
Yes, I rarely finish a book without devouring its final chapters.
20) Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?
Oprah.My sister.
