"A master of mood and atmosphere” (New York Times), Colin Harrison is the author of six thrillers, including Manhattan Nocturne, The Havana Room, and his latest, The Finder, a tale of global intrigue that reveals New York in all of its 21st-century splendor, greed, violence and desire. He spent six years as deputy editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now vice president and senior editor at Scribner. One of many critically acclaimed authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Mr. Harrison recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Libraries are sacred places in that they hold and preserve our history and culture. I’m a great admirer of libraries. And they’re a great place to write, too; I composed part of this new book in two public libraries, in Riverhead, NY and in Southold, NY.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I read the mass market paperback of The Godfather when I was about 12 and nothing was ever the same again….

Who is your favorite fictional character?

Too many to name. I like all of Shakespeare’s Fools, I like Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, I like the Chandler heroes, I like Batman.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read—which books would you start with?

I understand the spirit of the question but I don’t think people should be required to read certain books. That being said, they should be forcefully introduced to those certain books. You could make a good case that Americans should read All the President’s Men. In that vein, they should read Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

Well, I have that other job; I’m an editor and have been for 20 years. I think being a detective could be pretty interesting, if I could survive the human misery I’d see.

Tags: Take Five

Charles Bock’s debut novel, Beautiful Children, is a sweeping portrait of a depraved Las Vegas--from the bland misery of the suburbs to the explosive and exploitative sex industry--through the eyes of a runaway boy. The Washington Post writes, “[Bock’s] ability to share a deep understanding of America’s million or so lost street kids and their tormented parents give the book a whiff of greatness.” One of many critically acclaimed authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Mr. Bock recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

When I was a child, my mother used to drive me and my siblings to the main branch of the Vegas library, on Flamingo. We used to head upstairs and spend hours after school reading in the kid’s section, and would take breaks to go down to the candy and soda machines. I remember that we all used to sit underneath the stairs and play cops and robbers and cowboys and indians, hiding from the people who went up and down the stairwell. I actually used some of those memories in a scene in my novel, Beautiful Children. But libraries were a huge influence on me early. Even now they still play an important role for me in all kinds of different ways, including but not limited to research.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I read each installment of the Encyclopedia Brown series so many times that I pretty much knew all the mysteries by heart.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

That’s tough. Maybe Yossarian from Catch-22. He brought me tons of joy in that novel, and meanwhile had a backbone and a sense of what was right. Ask me tomorrow; I'll probably say someone else is my favorite fictional character, but for today, let’s go with him.

Who are three authors you think everyone should be required to read--what books would you start with?

Honestly, I think the question has a flawed premise. So many variables go into what kind of book is going to affect a person, including the given moment/phase in a person’s life when they read that particular book, or are exposed to that particular author. I can’t answer in any kind of definitive way. But here’s three books I love and which anyone reading this should go and check out. 1) The Dirt, Motley Crue with Neil Strauss. 2) The Known World, Edward P. Jones. 3) Purple America, Rick Moody.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

Rock God.

Tags: Take Five

Veronica Chambers has written and edited for national magazines for 12 years. Her memoir Mama’s Girl was deemed “extraordinary” by People magazine and named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Her latest book, Kickboxing Geishas, examines boundary-busting modern Japanese women who freely mix East and West, burying stereotypes to define an electrifying new culture in their country. One of many critically acclaimed authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Ms. Chambers recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

I got my first library card when I was something like six years old. But the biggest memory I have is of outgrowing my small local branch in Brooklyn and following the librarian's suggestion to visit the Donnell Library for children and young adults in Manhattan. I must've been 13 and taking the subway by myself to Rockefeller Center in pursuit of a library all about teens was such a thrill. Even now when I pass the Donnell, I get goose bumps. I spent an afternoon there recently, researching a teen novel that I'm writing. So it's a library that has popped up in my life in many ways now--first in my early teens, then in my 20s when I worked in magazines and passed it often on my way to meetings and now in my 30s, as I begin to write teen novels myself.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I'd have to say A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Even when I was really small, six or seven, it always meant a lot to me to be from Brooklyn. I was really proud of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the fact that Barbra Streisand had gone to the same high school as my dad. So when I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, it blew my mind that Francie Nolan (the main character) and I grew up in the same Brooklyn.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

My favorite fictional character, hands down, is Alice in Wonderland. I feel like her journey explains my whole peripatetic life. "Curiouser and curiouser" is how I begin my writing life and my personal life, each and every single day.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Oooo. This is tough. I'd say first, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. To me, it is modern American storytelling at its finest. It is pretty much a perfect first paragraph: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

I mean really. Perfection. The next book I'd recommend to any and everyone is Octavia Butler's Kindred because I think it's one of the most powerful stories about love, race, history and the cost we pay in the present for the wounds of the past.

For the third, I'll say Nick Hornby's About A Boy because I think that the ability it takes for an author to make you laugh out loud, and laugh so hard that your sides are hurting and then in the very same book, make you burst out in tears, is far too greatly underestimated. This is a book that goes down as easy as ice-cream. But I don't know about you, but I think people who can make truly, truly great ice-cream are genius.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

If I couldn't write books, I'd like to write about food. If I couldn't write about food, I'd like to write about fashion. If I couldn't write about food or fashion, then I'd like to be a chef or a clothing designer. Because besides books, there are few things I like better than food, fashion (and travel).

Tags: Take Five

Belong to Me is Marisa de los Santos’s follow-up to her New York Times bestselling novel Love Walked In. With a focus on what happens when leaps of faith and twists of fate collide with carefully constructed outer images, Belong to Me is a “bewitching, warmhearted grown-up fairy tale” (Jennifer Weiner). One of many critically acclaimed authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Ms. de los Santos recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

My mother would take my sister and me to our local library, and I remember feeling this mix of reverence and giddiness, like I was entering a church and Disney World at the same time. We would spend hours, but it was never long enough, and we brought back stacks of books.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I read more as a kid than I do now, and I read quite a lot now, so I had many favorites. But I loved this series of books by Elizabeth Enright about the Melendys, a wonderful family that moves from New York City to a big, rambling house in the country. I hate to name a favorite of the four books in this series, but if I had to choose, I’d say it was The Four-Story Mistake.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

I love Margaret Schlegel in E.M. Forster’s Howards End because she’s complex, smart, and funny, and she takes a group of miserable, alienated people and turns them into a family. It’s an incredibly heroic thing to do.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

E.M. Forster, Howards End; Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early; and Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I’d love to be a principal dancer in a ballet company!

Tags: Take Five

A native of the Scottish Highlands, Margot Livesey‘s thoughtful fiction showcases a keen wit and a wise heart. Her forthcoming novel, The House on Fortune Street, explores multiple perspectives on the life of a young London therapist while paying subtle homage to literary figures and works including Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. One of many critically acclaimed authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Ms. Livesey recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

A crucial one. I grew up in a place called Glenalmond--the valley of the River Almond--on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. The nearest town was ten miles away. From the age of seven I had a library card and when we went to town, perhaps once or twice a month, I would get out the maximum number of books allowed. At that time I could easily read a book a day. Later, at my secondary school, there was also a library from which I could borrow books but also enjoy the pleasure of reading amongst the stacks. And then in the libraries there were also librarians--understanding adults who seemed to think my longing for books was perfectly natural and who often guided me towards surprising and wonderful new authors.  As an adult I seldom leave home without my library card and am even more seldom without a book.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I loved Daddy Long-Legs, Pippi Longstocking, and Ferdinand the Bull. I also adored the much more Scottish Kidnapped.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

The hero of the first book I ever read was Percy the Bad Chick, and I remain devoted to him. Also, and always, Jane Eyre.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

This is such a hard question, and in order to attempt an answer I'm going to limit myself to dead British writers. George Eliot and Middlemarch. Ford Madox Ford and Parade's End. Elizabeth Bowen and The House in Paris.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I've always envied and admired people who work for organisations like Oxfam or Amnesty. If that didn't work out I'd love to work in a florist’s.

Tags: Take Five

Gregory Maguire writes novels in which classic villains turn out to be heroes--and supposed heroes disappoint. In Wicked, his bestselling novel and basis for the smash Broadway musical of the same name, he profiles Elphaba, the misunderstood Wicked Witch of the West. In Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, a retelling of Cinderella set in the Dutch Golden Age, Iris Fischer, Cinderella’s clever but painfully plain stepsister takes center stage. Maguire is also the author of Mirror Mirror, Son of a Witch, and most recently, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy. One of many bestselling authors who will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library during the second annual Philadelphia Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, 2008, Mr. Maguire recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Not too long ago, I participated in a photo shoot with the actresses then playing Elphaba and Glinda on the stage in New York. The caption of the advertisement read something like “Great American theater began in the public library.” I talked, in a brief line or two, about how affected I was by my childhood reading of The Wizard of Oz and other fantasies discovered on library shelves like gems and treasures (packed in their cellophane dust jackets next to dross and dreck, sometimes). My family was not prosperous, so the public libraries in Albany, New York, seemed nearly hallowed to us as a place to become revived, inspired, challenged, consoled, amused, and befuddled. I serve on the Board of Associates of the Boston Public Library now, in part to honor the debt I owe to public libraries, and also in part to help libraries continue to do that same work for toda’s young readers (and readers not so young).

What was your favorite childhood book?

Yesterday my 8-year-old Alex said at breakfast, “Ba,” (the Cambodian word for father) “do you know what? Every day when I wake up it seems like a dream.” I know what he means--sort of. Every day of childhood is different. Every day is stuffed with different passions. So there can be no one favorite childhood book, as all the days and years of childhood are different. Still, from the adult perspective, some books stand out: here are just a few. Jane Langton’s The Diamond in the Window, a fantasy set in Concord, Massachusetts. (Do you think that book influenced my decision to live in Concord as an adult? You're right.) Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! for its mystical overtones cut with a vaguely Borsch-belt comedy. Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy--I began a spy notebook in sixth grade, and 40 years later I still keep it, though now I call it my journal. Finally, in high school, T.H. White’s gallimaufry of Arthurian legends, The Once and Future King--which would serve as a kind of template for my own work in reimagining the history behind The Wizard of Oz, which has become the cycle known as the Wicked Years.

Who is your favorite fictional character? 

Probably Merlin the Magician, in all his variety and multiple manifestations in ancient and contemporary literature, though I also like the Russian witch called Baba Yaga. My tastes haven’t changed much since childhood.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read—which books would you start with?

Since one should start reading in childhood, I would say Mother Goose for nonsense if not insanity; Grimm and Perrault and the Greek myths and Old Testament stories for a stable foundation in archetypes; Dr. Seuss for his marriage of ethics and anarchy; Sendak for psychological honesty; and Beatrix Potter, Arnold Lobel (the Frog and Toad books) and James Marshall (George and Martha) for object lessons in loyalty, friendship, and perseverance. If you missed any of these books because you are too old to have got them in childhood, go back and start over. It’s never too late. Everything else descends from these, including usefully wise behavior as a citizen.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

Over the past 30 years I have often taught literature and writing to children and adults. I don’t do this much anymore due to my obligations to my young children. If I had a better singing voice I would like to be an actor in musicals. If I had longer legs I wouldn’t mind being a dancer. Oddly enough, I am preternaturally well-organized, and so I have always said that if and when my career as a writer ever tanks, I will hire myself out to be an executive assistant in some hot shot law firm or something. I love to file and I also love to boss people around, especially myself. (That’s what makes me a productive self-employed writer: I am both labor and management, and as management I drive a hard bargain.) 

Tags: Take Five

Anne Perry is the author of several bestselling mystery novels featuring famed protagonists Inspector William Monk and Special Services Detective Thomas Pitt. Buckingham Palace Gardens is her latest novel featuring Detective Pitt, who is called in to investigate the mystery behind a mutilated body found among the Queen’s monogrammed sheets in a Buckingham Palace linen closet the morning after a raucous party. Ms. Perry will be appearing at the Parkway Central Library’s Montgomery Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15. (This event is free--no tickets required.) She recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

They make it possible to reach a large number of readers I could not otherwise, and that is extremely important. I have been made welcome at terrific library events. I don't borrow from them myself as we do not have a large public library anywhere near us. Occasionally my researcher goes to the local library to consult newspapers and magazines of the Victorian era.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

That depends on which day you ask me! At the moment, Alex Delaware from Jonathan Kellerman’s crime stories--for his humanity and compassion.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Dante (begin with The Inferno) for his profundity and ease of reading (in translation!). Oscar Wilde, for his unsurpassed wit and compassion. His short stories are excellent--start with “The Happy Prince.” G.K. Chesterton for his sublime joy and use of the language--begin with his poetry or fantasies.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I would like to direct films--it is another way of telling a story.

Tags: Take Five

For his 2003 novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, Brian Hall won acclaim for the way he used the intimate voice of fiction to capture the half-hidden personal stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his new novel, Fall of Frost, Hall turns to the life of Robert Frost, arguably America's best-known poet. Told in short chapters, Hall's novel deftly weaves together the earlier parts of Frost's life with his final year, 1962, when, at age 88--and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis--he made a visit to Russia. Mr. Hall will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8. (This event is free--no tickets required.) He recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

My hometown library, the Cary Memorial Library in Lexington, Massachusetts, was hugely important to me when I was growing up. My family did buy some books, but most of my childhood reading was of books from the library. From age six to 16, I was a science fiction fan, and read through most of the library’s holdings in that genre. Today, when I return to Lexington to visit my mother, I often go by Cary with my two daughters. Both girls are devoted book readers, but at Cary, my older daughter checks her email and surfs the net, while my younger daughter reads magazines and manga. Meanwhile, I go down to the bottom floor and look through the science fiction shelves. The library has been rebuilt twice since I was a child, and the stacks and rooms all look different. But I can find a few of the very copies of books I read as a kid, like the Nebula Award Stories Five (1970) I came across on my last visit. I sit in a comfy chair (there were none of those when I was a kid) and read those stories that swept me away 38 years ago, on the same paper I held then. Impossible to describe the depth of feeling of that, lost in the past, reading of the past’s future, holding my own past’s outgrown dreams.

Today I use the Tompkins County Library of Ithaca, New York for my pleasure reading (books out right now: two biographies of Carl Sagan, and Nabokov’s first novel, Mary; also a DVD of the 1983 BBC production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2) and the Cornell University Library for my professional needs. I’m not affiliated with Cornell, so I pay the paltry sum of $250 a year for the privilege of access to--well, I can’t remember, is it six million volumes? Eight million? Is that, maybe, a thousand Libraries of Alexandria? Once at the circulation desk I overheard a foreign student asking the librarian how many books he could have out at one time on his card. The librarian answered, “Four hundred.” It was a fascinating and wonderful sight, watching the student’s face: the snicker at what was surely a joke, the wait for the real answer, the puzzlement when none was forthcoming, the slow incredulous dawning of the realization that the librarian wasn’t kidding.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Well, to name one would be arbitrary, so I’ll name several. I’ll also have to pick an age: so call me 12. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander. The Tripods trilogy by John Christopher. The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

It’s easier to answer this for when I was a child, since as an adult my emotional responses are too varied and ambivalent, and my reading history too long, to allow anything like a “favorite” to emerge. As regards my childhood, I’ll have to mention two, and one of them is from television: both boys, both like slightly older brothers, or anyway more mature and infinitely more interesting best friends, both named Will. The first is Will Parker, the main character in the Tripods trilogy, who saves Earth from alien occupation, and the second is Will Robinson, from the television show Lost in Space, who leaves Earth to confront aliens elsewhere. I had just turned six when Lost in Space first aired, and I fell in love with it instantly. I can still remember that Wednesday evening (7:30 p.m., September 15, 1965) with great clarity; my mother’s misconception that the show ended at 8:00, instead of 8:30, her call for me to get ready for bed halfway through the program, my anguished howl (fortunately successful) that I be allowed the extra half hour. Although this is a library questionnaire, I feel I must own up to the fact that the single greatest impact on my imaginative emotions as a child was that television program.

If I must answer this as an adult, I’ll skip the list, and just arbitrarily mention one name that would be somewhere on it, and which perhaps isn’t one of the usual suspects: Mohun Biswas, struggling would-be writer and powerless protagonist of V.S. Naipaul’s nearly perfect and heartbreaking comic novel, A House for Mr. Biswas.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

That’s an easy one. I don’t think everyone should be required to read anything. That sounds to me like the death of any enjoyment of literature; and readers won’t get a thing out of something they don’t enjoy. I can only presume to say what’s good for me, so I’ll change this question to the classic one of which author I would take to a desert island if I could take only one. That’s also easy, and my answer’s hardly unusual: Shakespeare.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I always thought acting looked like a lot of fun. Actors, like writers, get to have the illusion of living different lives in this one life we’re allotted; it’s the only cheating of death I think we’re allowed.

Tags: Take Five

A reporter for more than 20 years, including more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun, Laura Lippman infuses her Tess Monaghan Mysteries with the authenticity of experience. Ms. Lippman will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, the same day her new novel, Another Thing to Fall, will hit bookstores and library shelves. (This event is free--no tickets required.) She recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

My mother's a librarian. Do I need to say more? I will, anyway. My mother went back to school in the 70s, to get her master's in library science, and one of my fondest memories is working through the Newbery list with her.

As an adult, I've been so fortunate to have librarians among my early fans. (See, that's librarians. They're actually much quicker to spot what's new and hip.) I couldn't possibly name them all, but one, Doris Ann Norris, is so important to me that she's the co-dedicatee of What the Dead Know.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Hmm, I guess this is one time when I can't cite Lolita as my favorite book, although I did read it as a 12-year-old. Didn't understand it, but I read it. I'm going to pick Half Magic, a perfect book. The thing about Edward Eager is that his youthful characters are all readers and don't run to stereotypes at all. The boys and girls (often siblings) share their adventures equally. In fact, the girls are often feisty and troublesome, while the boys can be calm and even-tempered. Since the Harry Potter mania began, I keep waiting for kids to go back and discover Eager, and Half Magic is the best of them all.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

It's really close, but Betsy Ray just squeaks past Beany Malone. (I don't have the hubris to pick Tess Monaghan, but she's good company.)

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Jane Austen, Theodore Dreiser and James Crumley. And the books, respectively, would be Pride and Prejudice, Sister Carrie and The Last Good Kiss. Austen, because she illustrates what Eudora Welty wrote about writers with sheltered lives: all serious daring starts from within. Dreiser because, clumsy as his sentences can be, I've never known another writer who basically does the Vulcan mind meld on the page. Reading Dreiser, one becomes his characters. And Crumely because it is my oft-state opinion that he, more than any other crime writer, helped to kick in the renaissance of the PI novel in the 90s, when talents such as George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane first started to flourish.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I'd probably be a social worker. Or a librarian!

Tags: Take Five

Winner of the 1996 National Book Award for fiction for her story collection Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett will be appearing at the Central Library’s Montgomery Auditorium tomorrow, Thursday, October 11, at 7:00 p.m. (Also appearing as part of the same program will be celebrated novelist Claire Messud, author of When the World Was Steady and The Emperor’s Children ; this event is free--no tickets required.) Ms. Barrett’s latest novel, The Air We Breathe, was published last week. She recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Libraries have been, at different times in my life, school, home, refuge: everything important. Places where I could find the nourishment I needed, the books I craved; I still spend an enormous amount of time in them, everything from my local public library to the college library where I teach, to special archives and libraries all around the country.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I had lots of favorites, but I especially loved A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and anything about people exploring in the Arctic or the Antarctic.

What made you think you could be a writer?

Nothing did, when I was young; I didn’t meet a living writer until I was well into my twenties, and I didn’t really understand that a person could be a writer. But I read so much, so constantly and so happily, that once I grasped that actual living female people could be writers, it wasn’t a huge leap to try it myself.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Three--only three? Impossible to make such a short list. But who could live without Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or Shakespeare’s plays?

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

Reference librarian!

Tags: Take Five

Ann Patchett will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium on Wednesday, October 3, at 8:00 p.m. Click here for ticket info. She recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Going to the library was the center of my social life when I was young. I went there with friends to study and we all felt terribly grown up. I think it was the first place I was allowed to be out on my own for extended periods of time. After we’d done our work, or sometimes before we’d done our work, we’d do incredibly reckless things like read books on witchcraft and look at the free puppies on the community bulletin board and make Xerox copies of our hands. I had a very tame childhood.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Charlotte’s Web .

What made you think you could be a writer?

I never actually thought about doing anything else. I had one good idea early on--be a writer--and I stuck with it.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Shakespeare is always the best bet for a writer who will work for everyone--Richard III for history, Othello for tragedy and Much Ado About Nothing for comedy (though it is hard to make a bad choice). Chekhov is very universal, consistently perfect; any of the stories and plays would be good--“Lady with Lapdog,” “The Kiss,” “Concerning Love.” I’ll put Yeats in the third spot because everyone needs to read more poetry, myself included. If you want me to recommend three wonderful books you otherwise might miss: The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell, and Endless Love , Scott Spencer.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I’d like to make dioramas . I would be very happy spending the rest of my life constructing tiny trees.

Tags: Take Five

Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket himself) will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium on Tuesday, October 2, at 8:00 p.m. Click here for ticket info. He recently took a moment to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

My local library, the West Portal Branch in San Francisco, was my first taste of genuine freedom--my parents said I could take home any books I could carry.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Dino Buzzati's The Bears' Famous Invasion Of Sicily .

What made you think you could be a writer?

Other writers. Not other writers I met--I didn't really meet any until I was older--but other writers I read.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

I don't think any books should be required of everyone, but anyone who hasn't read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, William Maxwell 's The Folded Leaf and Alice Munro's Open Secrets really shouldn't approach me and complain they have nothing to read.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

Crimefighting superhero.

Tags: Take Five

Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium tomorrow, Thursday, September 20, at 12:00 p.m. (This event is free; no tickets required.) His latest book, Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far), was released this past Monday. Mr. Barry recently took some time to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Growing up, I was a big reader. I spent many happy hours in the public library in my home town, Armonk, New York. Later I came to appreciate the value of academic libraries, especially the one at Haverford College, from which I graduated. Now I take my 7-year-old daughter, Sophie, to the library, and I'm pleased to note that she's also an avid reader.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I read everything from comic books to classics. But my favorite childhood book was Winnie-the-Pooh. It's still one of my favorites.

What made you think you could be a writer?

I was always interested in writing, and my teachers encouraged me. I wrote for my high school and college newspapers, and when I graduated I decided to try to become a reporter. I loved it right away, and have never really wanted to do anything but write since then.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

George Orwell's Animal Farm, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I'd like to be a musician. Unfortunately, I have very little talent.

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Diane Ackerman, acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Senses, will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium this Thursday, September 20, at 8:00 p.m. (Click here to buy tickets online.) Ackerman's new book, The Zookeeper's Wife, was just released this month; it's a narrative nonfiction account of one of the most successful hideouts of World War II, the Warsaw Zoo. Ms. Ackerman recently took a few minutes to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Believe it or not, there were very few books in my home when I was growing up in Waukegan, Illinois. And the library was a long bus ride away. That made the library's bookmobile so precious. By the time I was in third grade, I knew where to find heroes, monsters, and other worlds between covers, in a friendly little cave with wheels--the Bookmobile--which stopped only two blocks from my house. Outside, it looked like an unassuming trailer or bus, but inside the walls were lined with colorful books that smelled of wood shavings, silver polish, and dust, just like a real library. It had solid wooden shelves, a card catalogue, and moveable steps for reaching the higher books. I couldn't reach them anyway, since the steps only added three feet to me, but the children's books were shelved at ground level, so I could sit on the carpet and choose among half a dozen to adopt. One of the things I liked best about the Bookmobile was the 12" by 8" cream-colored cardboard print of a suitcase named "World Traveler" that I got the first day I started taking out books. Every week I received a new stamp to put on my suitcase, beginning with a pink one of a Bookmobile driving down a country lane, then one of Norway, India, South America, Africa, Spain, Holland, U.S.S.R., Sweden, Scotland. Somewhere along the line, I earned a blue satin ribbon that said "Reading Achievement Award," which the librarian stapled to my suitcase with a flourish. I especially liked the thin colorful books with gold spines in which Santa rode his sleigh across the sky or Pinocchio danced. My love of books began there, in that slender kingdom on wheels.

What made you think you could be a writer?

When I was a freshman at Boston University, majoring in biopsychology, I transferred schools, and the computer put me in English by mistake. Since I had been writing shyly but enthusiastically every since I was little, I considered it fate.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Only three books? Well, this morning I'd choose The Velveteen Rabbit, The Tempest, and something by Virginia Woolf. This afternoon, who knows... I have so many beloved books in so many disciplines.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

If I couldn't be an author, I'd probably be a Buddhist monk. Poets and monks both pay detailed loving attention to the world. Carpe diem.

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Science fiction icon William Gibson will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium this Thursday, August 16 at 7:00 p.m. (This event is free; no tickets required.) His latest novel, Spook Country, was released earlier this month. Mr. Gibson took a few moments to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

My mother, an avid reader, bootstrapped a tiny storefront library into operation, more or less single-handedly, when I was about 10. My hometown had lost its public library to a fire, years before. But I have been more a user of the secondhand shops than of public libraries. Probably out of some need for randomness, and freedom from the merely popular.

What was your favorite childhood book?

It changed constantly. I recall a two-volume set of Doyle's Complete Sherlock Holmes as an early favorite.

What made you think you could be a writer?

Science fiction writers were more accessible, and at 14 or so I had written Fritz Leiber a couple of fan letters, and gotten very kind postcards back. This showed me that writers, even favorite ones, were actually people, which until then I hadn't been entirely sure of.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

I don't think people should be required to read anything. I've always reacted negatively to “required” reading, myself, as a reader. Putting it on a required list was always the easiest way (or the only way, in some cases) to keep me from reading something. In some scenario where future Americans were only allowed to read a single work of fiction, and it fell to me to choose, I'd opt for an omnibus unexpurgated Tom ‘n Huck. I'm yet to see Twain make anybody meaner or less forgiving.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I'd like to design streetwear. Seems odd, I know, but it's really another form of “recombinant codes” creativity, which is what writing has always felt like to me. Any streetscape with people is a field of codes, of communication, and the codes that work (rather like Chris Alexander's Pattern Language in architecture) help people look good, feel good. That’s actually the opposite of “fashion,” though.

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Alison Bechdel is best known for her long-running, syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which she first began working on in the early 1980s. Her bestselling memoir in graphic novel form, Fun Home, was published last year to critical acclaim from both within and beyond the GLBT and comics aficionado communities. Ms. Bechdel will be appearing here at the Central Library’s Montgomery Auditorium on Tuesday, June 26 at 7:00 p.m. (This event is free; no tickets required.) She took a few moments to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

Libraries have played a critical role in my life. I certainly remember my mother taking me to get my first library card, at the Ross Library in Lock Haven, PA. I was probably five or six, but even then the whole scenario--that I could just take whatever books I wanted--struck me as wondrously counter to most of the rules I had learned so far about life.

But I didn't fully appreciate libraries until I was in college, and coming out as a lesbian. The books I found after realizing I could just look up "homosexuality" in the card catalog were life-altering, if not life-saving.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Harriet the Spy.

What made you think you could be a writer?

Harriet the Spy. Not at the time--as a kid I just knew I loved that book. But when I got older and realized that it was a book about the pleasures and difficulties of writing, and about writing as a necessary activity, I could see that on some deep level it had gotten woven into my sense of who I was.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to
read--which books would you start with?

Oh, God. I would never require anyone to read anything. In fact, as soon as someone tells me I have to read something, no matter how excited they might be about it, that book now possesses a force field that prevents me from ever opening it.

My dad was always trying to get me to read particular books. You would think that would be a great thing for a kid, but he was so proprietary about these novels--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--that it took some of the pleasure away when I finally read them. It was like he'd already colonized these places, and I was there on his terms.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I'd like to be a reference librarian. And I'm not just sucking up because this is a library quiz. I've given this a lot of thought over the years. My work study job in college was at the circ desk in the library, and I was really good at it. I scored even higher that my boss on some crazy test we had to take, matching long columns of letters and numbers. And it made me ecstatically happy to be able to help someone find something. Really, it was weird how good that made me feel.

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On the strength of a manuscript of her first novel, The Icarus Girl , author Helen Oyeyemi signed a two-book deal with British publisher Bloomsbury at the age of 19. Having recently graduated from Cambridge University, Oyeyemi is back with her second novel, The Opposite House, a work that "explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity." In support of her new book, Ms. Oyeyemi will be appearing here at the Central Library’s Montgomery Auditorium tomorrow, Tuesday, June 19 at 7:00 p.m. (This event is free; no tickets required.) She took a few moments to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

A huge one. Up until I was about seventeen most of the books I read were from libraries. Every other Saturday my dad would take me to the library, and I'd take about two hours to pick seven books...it was anguish to have to leave a book I thought I'd like on the shelf because it over-ran my quota...traumatisin'.

What was your favorite childhood book?

A tie between Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr.

What made you think you could be a writer?

I used to cross out the parts of books that I disagreed with (for example Beth dying in Little Women), and having done that I had to come up with alternatives...so writing began as a small protest against unfair storytelling! Yeah!

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Love in The Time of Cholera), Emily Dickinson (Collected Works), and Daniil Kharms (Incidences).

If you couldn't write, what other job would you like to have?

O please don't laugh...but I'd try to be a librarian.

Tags: Take Five

Author Julia Glass will be appearing at the Central Library’s Skyline Room on Thursday, June 14 at 7:00 p.m. (This event is free; no tickets required.) Glass won the National Book Award in 2002 for her debut novel, Three Junes. Her second novel, The Whole World Over, was published in May of last year. She took a few moments to chat with us about some of our favorite topics.

What role have libraries played in your life?

In Lincoln, Massachusetts, the lovely town where I spent most of my childhood, you could start working at the public library as a “page”--putting away books for an hourly pittance--as soon as you reached fifth grade. Ever the bookworm, I could hardly wait to achieve this glorious status; I think I made my mother drive me straight to the library from my first day of school that year, fearing a line around the block. Oh what a nerd I was! I worked at this library--essentially a magnificent Victorian mansion--from that very week, starting on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons, all the way through the summer before my senior year of college, by which time I had gained the experience to substitute full-time for the children’s librarian while she took a sabbatical. I embraced every new task entrusted to me, from typing catalog cards to covering new books, from calculating overdue fines to maintaining the long reserve lists for such runaway bestsellers as Fear of Flying and Future Shock. Later on, at Yale, I loved both the grandeur and the grandiosity of all its libraries, and I found myself completely at ease in that world--books my oxygen--yet none of them would ever mean as much to me as the place I first made money doing something I loved; first stole wide-eyed glimpses of Portnoy’s Complaint and Candy; first took Shakespeare off the shelves and whispered his verses aloud when no one was near. (Yes, I’m still a nerd.) That library was also the haven of my adolescence, the place I went to escape whenever my parents and sister seemed most heinous and benighted to me. I can’t say the Lincoln Public Library made me a writer, but I would definitely say that it--and many of the grown-ups who worked there--helped bring me up. It was, in a way, my third parent.

What was your favorite childhood book?

I would have to name two, from two different stages of childhood. The first book I ever asked my parents to buy for me--after hearing Captain Kangaroo read it on TV--was Karla Kuskin’s clever, funny picture book Roar and More (published in 1956, the year I was born). Appallingly, it’s out of print, but I still own my original copy and have shared it often with both of my sons. Later, when I was nine, I fell deliriously in love with the world Jane Langton created in The Diamond in the Window. I’d read it several times over when I had the astonishing experience of being invited to tea at Jane’s house. She was my first “real-live author.” (The very year I discovered her book, my family moved, by coincidence, to the town where she lived; it was my mother who found out we were virtual neighbors.) Life came full circle a few years ago when Jane attended the reading I gave from my first novel at my childhood bookstore--where she is a local legend. Recently, I read The Diamond in the Window to my older son and was pleased to find it just as vividly strange and wonderful as ever.

What made you think you could be a writer?

Considering how long it took me to discover the work I love best--writing fiction--a better question might be, What kept me from realizing that I should be a writer? The answer to both questions lies in this observation: For as long as I could remember, I was so constantly in awe of so many great storytellers that it did not occur to me that there would be any point in trying my hand at this venerable craft. Not that I was overly modest; I believed my main talents lay elsewhere. For most of my early adulthood, I set my sights on the visual arts, on painting and drawing--and I wasn’t bad--while making money as a freelance editor and magazine writer. All the while, I continued to read fiction--the “great novels”--like an addict. One day, around the time I turned thirty, something obvious hit me upside the head: I realized that no work of art had the potential to move me as deeply as a great work of fiction--and if this was so, why wasn’t that the art form I’d chosen? This revelation occurred to me when I finished reading Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s final novel--which, I’m happy to say, gives me a ready title whenever someone asks if there’s a book that changed my life.

Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read--which books would you start with?

May I be so impertinent as to call this question cruel and quite possibly counterproductive? It’s one thing for scholars to argue which books are the most essential--that’s part of their job--but how can those of us down in the trenches honestly choose favorites--or so few? And the true answers rarely surprise. If I were to suggest, for instance, that the three winning titles are the Old Testament, The Odyssey, and King Lear--and that’s not what I’m definitively saying!--wouldn’t you yawn? Meanwhile, I’d lose a good night’s sleep over not mentioning works by Lady Murasaki, E.M. Forster, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Jane Austen . . . oh, George Eliot! Grimm’s fairy tales! The Golden Bough! . . . and then another night’s sleep as I pondered the culturally limited range of even my longer list and what it means about everything I’ve never read that I ought to. . . . No, I’d much rather introduce readers to something entirely new, even if it isn’t quite Homer or Shakespeare. So instead I’ll name the three best books I’ve read in the past year (all novels): Grief, by Andrew Holleran; A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus; and Finn, by Jon Clinch.

If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

I have always thought that there would be no greater, more satisfying job than that of a singer. I work so hard to express what I know and feel about the human condition through the dry, sometimes remote art of writing; how much more direct and joyful it would be to use my own actual voice as the medium of expression. But that’s not a talent I have. Recently, though, I have indeed discovered the vocation I would follow with passion if I could no longer write. Two years ago, when I moved from an apartment into a house, I began gardening. I love everything about it: burrowing in the dirt with my bare hands, getting to know plants and trees by their name (a longtime fascination even before I had a garden), getting to know their likes and dislikes, their personalities and relationships, nurturing and protecting them. So if the words all dried up on me, I would most definitely want to become a full-time horticulturalist, perhaps the head gardener of a great estate, given free rein, a few helpers--and lifetime residence in a rose-covered cottage near the sea.

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