Literary Questions

1. What author do you own the most books by?
I think Nick Hornby holds a slight edge on Douglas Adams (although three volumes of columns from "The Believer" strikes me as cheating).

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
Every Christmas I buy a copy of David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident to give to someone as a gift (it's my favorite book, and I want to make sure it stays in print). So I almost always have an extra copy around.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
It makes me wonder what kind of drugs you're on.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
It's no secret that I've always been smitten with Jo from Little Women. It is a bit sad, though, that so few of the books I read these days feature female characters as strong, independent, brilliant and funny as she is. Can anyone recommend some?

4a. What fictional character would you most like to be?
I like immersing myself in the worlds of Philip Marlowe and the Shadow, but I don't think I'd want to be either of them. I guess I'll have to go with Robin Hood. I've always looked good in green, and I tend to admire community organizers who believe in redistributing wealth.

4b. What fictional character do you think most resembles you?
Rob Fleming, the narrator of Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, is a man in his 30s whose life revolves around music, obscure movies and making lists of things. I can see a slight resemblance.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. I can now report that it doesn't actually work that well as a travel guide.

6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
The High King, by Lloyd Alexander. I even created a board game based on the book as part of a project for my fifth-grade reading class.

7. What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
John Marks' Reasons to Believe isn't a bad book, exactly. It begins with a great premise: Marks, a former evangelical Christian who lost his faith while working as a reporter, sets out to describe the world of American fundamentalist Christianity, why he struggles with it and why it still maintains a hold on him. The book focuses more on him than it does on his description of fundamentalist America, however, and I was more interested in the latter. I suppose that's why I don't tend to read a lot of memoirs.

8. What is the best book you've read in the past year?
The Chinatown Death-Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. It's an imagined adventure in the lives of Walter Gibson and Lester Dent (better known as the creators of The Shadow and Doc Savage), told in the pulp style and featuring appearances by H.P. Lovecraft and a little-known writer of dime Westerns named L. Ron Hubbard. It's the sort of thing that could either be a mess or work really well, and it works REALLY well. I've recently heard that Malmont is at work on a sequel; in the mean time, I'll have to content myself with his new book on Jack London.

9. If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I would never force anyone to read a book. I think many people would enjoy reading Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Transitive Vampire, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a macabre perspective on grammar.

10. Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Someone whose work I've never read. I count on things like the Nobel Prize to introduce me to authors with whom I'm not familiar. To be honest, however, I can't remember the last prize-winning author whose work I sought out.

11. What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I tend to cringe whenever a book I really like is made into a movie, since it rarely gains anything by the adaptation. That being said, I would go to see a film of Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

12. What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
A year ago, I would have said Watchmen. Now I'll say Douglas Coupland's Generation X, and for the same reason: so much of my experience of reading the book comes from the way it is presented on the page, and that just doesn't translate to a visual medium.

13. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
Most of the women I've dated since college have been writers. You can draw your own conclusions.

14. What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
What counts as lowbrow? I've found profound insights into my life and the world within the pages of self-help books, comics and even memoirs, and I've read critical darlings that struck me as self-important piffle. Genre classifications seem to me to be useful for organizing the aisles at Barnes & Noble and Borders, and not much else.

15. What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Both the Bible and Plato's Republic are challenging reads, but I'm enjoying them.

16. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
I don't think The Tempest is particularly obscure, but the Shakespeare-on-the-Common production I saw a few years back was a pretty good one.

17. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I like French short stories and Russian novels.

18. Roth or Updike?
I can't put Updike down. I have a hard time picking Roth up.

19. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
I think that Dave Eggers is a really, really good writer, even if I did not enjoy his first book. I like listening to David Sedaris, but I don't enjoy reading his work.

20. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
I have a feeling I'll be reading Chaucer in my 80s and still finding new things to think about.

21. Austen or Eliot?
I love reading Eliot, but I'd rather hang out with Jane Austen.

22. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I've read very few works by Asian authors, and my knowledge of Roman history is threadbare. But I'm working on it.

23. What is your favorite novel?
I've mentioned The Chaneysville Incident already. Here is what I like about it: It is a novel about historians and the work they do, but it is not an academic novel. It deals with the issue that is perhaps most central to the American experience — slavery — and treats it as an integral part of the American experience, rather than an African-American issue. It examines the relationships between fathers and sons and men and women honestly, without angst; its central character is damaged and troubled, but still a basically decent human being. It unfolds in plain, beautiful language, and it hurtles along like a locomotive — I had to remind myself to eat while reading it. It is a work of fiction, and it is a true story.

24. Play?
Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth.

25. Poem?
John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."

26. Essay?
Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder."

27. Short story?
Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With the Little Dog."

28. Work of nonfiction?
The best nonfiction work I read recently was Norman Davies' Rising '44, an account of the Warsaw Uprising that's saturated with detail, yet still manages to read like a thriller.

29. Who is your favorite writer?
Nam. The short list of writers whose work I would pick up, sight unseen, includes Michael Chabon, Nick Hornby, Kelly Link, Patrick O'Brian and Mark Twain.

30. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
What a horrible question. If someone finds meaning and hope or even a few hours of entertainment in a book by Dan Brown or James Frey or Robert James Waller, who am I to say they shouldn't? What gives me the right to say that my taste should be the litmus test by which other writers should be judged? Who do I think I am, anyway?

That said, Don DeLillo is the most overrated writer alive today.

31. What is your desert island book?
I have only read one book about a desert island — Robinson Crusoe — and do not particularly want to read another one.

32. And ... what are you reading right now?
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke; The Art of Living, Epictetus (with Sharon Lebell); If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino.