|
|
|
Vol. 38, No. 18 |
 |
7-16-2008 Booktalk, 7/17/08
Intensive Care: Selected & New Poems by Miroslav Holub
One of my enduring favorites. Every so often, I hear someone confidently declare “nobody writes poetry about science” and I’ll point them to this book. The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi This book is another, more recent favorite. The poetry in this volume is like a really good cup of coffee: Dark and complex and fires up interesting places in your brain. Last Call by Tim Powers I also admire this book, because the plot driving this modern retelling of the Fisher King myth is a truly amazing machine. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’ Engle My favorite children’s book. It was one of the books that really engaged me as a young reader and made me decide I wanted to become a writer. In some ways it’s a bit dated now, but it’s still a wonderful read. Coffin County by Gary A. Braunbeck This is my most recent favorite. It was written by my novelist husband and is based on a story called “Haceldama” he wrote a decade or so ago. At the time I read it I had just met Gary, but the dark, fierce tale completely floored me. So I’d been pestering him to expand it into a novel ever since then. Wifely nagging for the win! Who is your favorite character in literature? Probably the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. She must run as fast as she can just to keep her place in the race. I can relate to her predicament. What is the last book you’ve bought? I believe it’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Gary and I buy a lot of books, and we also receive a lot of books for review, so I’m not 100 percent certain this is my most recent purchase, but it’s been my current bedtime reading. What’ s your “guilty pleasure” — a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature? I don’t worry too much about whether the books I read are considered “serious” by anyone else — I care about whether they’re engaging and tell me something new about the world. Having said that, I quite enjoyed Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb, which isn’t by any stretch an especially well-written book but it’s a lot of fun. What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it? I haven’t read Moby Dick. Somehow I was never assigned it in high school or undergrad literature, and since then other books have wrestled for my time (and won). I do intend to read it someday, but given the teetering height of my books-to-read stack it might not be anytime soon. What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read? If I had kids, I think I would be happy with them reading most any book since so many kids (and adults, for that matter) won’t willingly read anything more complex than the instruction book that came with their Nintendo Wii. OK, if I found my 10-year-old reading Nixon – A Presidency Revealed I might be a little worried. But optimistic. What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why? I mainly read fiction because I mainly write fiction, but I also read poetry and all manner of nonfiction. Partly to improve my craft and partly for pleasure or information. The lines are often blurred; if I’m not fundamentally enjoying a book, I don’t usually stick with it just because it’s supposed to be good for me. What magazines do you subscribe to and why? To cut down on paper piles, I tend to mostly read magazines online or in electronic format: The fiction magazines Strange Horizons and Greatest Uncommon Denominator, the nonfiction magazines Science News and Locus, plus assorted news magazines. Mostly I read these to keep up with who’s publishing what or to learn something.
|
Lucy Snyder,