We decided to play the Q&A game with the ABC staff, and asked all sorts of bookish questions. In the coming weeks we will be posting their (sometimes cheeky!) answers here on the blog, so you can learn a little more about us.
Enjoy!
This time around we talk to Lauren, our blog editor who does her best checking if what we write makes sense.
What are your top 3 favorite books or authors?
This is always an impossible question. But I’ll go with: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum, some things by Salman Rushdie, everything by Michael Chabon.
What is your favorite genre to read?
Fiction. As a journalist, I spend most of my waking life in non-fiction. Fiction takes me away. And when I want to escape into the world of detecting, it’s Sara Paretsky and her V. I. Warshawski novels hands down.
In which literary world would you like to live/go on vacation?
I guess it would be nice to go behind a looking glass, not necessarily Lewis Carroll’s, but still an intriguing idea!
I’m not a reader of fantasy, but I’d love to travel to the fictitious accounts of real places throughout the ages: Caleb Carr’s turn-of-the-20th-century New York from The Alienist. Also, the Metropol Hotel when Count Alexander Rostov is there. And single. (From A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.)
Frankly, I’d love to visit Tolstoy’s Russia, Proust’s Paris, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Nigeria and David Liss’ 17th century Amsterdam from The Coffee Trader. But I want a return ticket home!
What is your favorite bookish animal?
I’m sorry to say, but my animal choices fall into the screen-to-possible-books section.
Babe’s Ferdinand (fine, and Babe, too). Lassie, Felix the Cat. Charlotte and Wilbur. And my childhood favorite, Walter the Lazy Mouse.
Do you have any reading tips for our customers?
My guilty pleasure is reading in bed when I first wake up in the morning. Mostly on the weekends, but sometimes even a few pages before I start my workday sets the mood and tempo and gives me some quiet time and space.
But I read the most at night before I go to sleep. And as a chronic insomniac, a book can sometimes be the best sedative! (Clearly, my rec seems to be: read while lying down!)
What non-book item at ABC can you not pass by without looking at it?
Everything! I love to browse the magazines. And I love the branded merchandise—the bags, sweatshirts and pens. The pens are THE BEST ever. I have stacks of them.
I just love bookish merch, so I go through it all.
Which book changed your (look on) life?
Two books come to mind (although there are so many more!): Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann made the link for me between literature and good writing, reflecting and making order of the world and ourselves. His description of unrequited love also resonated with my teenage self!
An essay on Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus that I also read in high school and haven’t been able to find since. It gave me the philosophical underpinning of life—own your rock!—which is all the religion I seemed to need.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene, also a high school read, shed light on the “America” we weren’t learning about in history class. As did Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
