Alice Hoffman Goes Nuts on Twitter

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Social networking can be a great vehicle for artists to get closer to their fans. The glimpse into the lives of artists as people and to possibly even interact with those artists are important reasons why I think so many people follow celebrities on Twitter (full disclosure, I follow Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Wil Wheaton, Michael Ian Black, John Hodgman, Joe Hill, and Neil Gaiman on Twitter). Of course, I this sort of transparency is probably not a good thing if those glimpses into the lives of artists reveal them to be, well, jerks.

Gawker posted a story about writer Alice Hoffman, who was enraged by a lukewarm review of her work by Roberta Silman in The Boston Globe. It was reminicent of when Anne Rice freaked out on Amazon reviewers. Listen, as a writer myself, I know it doesn’t feel good for someone to criticize your work, but it’s going to happen. Not everyone is going to like everything you write. They just won’t. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Amazon reviewers rated Alice Hoffman’s book Blackbird House so highly. I really didn’t like it. To be honest, in terms of a more critical and accurate rating, I think the Goodreads rating is probably closer. I gave the novel three stars on Goodreads. The current ratings for the book at Amazon and Goodreads vary by approximately one star. File that information away for next time you get a book based on good Amazon reviews and find yourself disappointed (check Goodreads!).

What’s ridiculous about Hoffman’s infantile tirade is that she’s been writing for long enough that she should know criticism comes with the territory, which also means that not every review is going to be glowing. In fact, some might even be bad. The sad thing for Hoffman is seeing her public reaction will likely turn some readers off her works. I already didn’t like the one book I read, but I wouldn’t have ruled out reading another book. You know what though? I have now. She showed absolutely no class. If, as she claims, she was truly just disappointed that the reviewer gave away too much of the plot, then why not take the high road and say something like “Disappointed that Roberta Silman spoiled too much the plot in her review” and leave it at that? And cloaking her bad behavior under the guise of defending herself or feminism was just sad. I have no desire to support someone who acts like that with my purchases or even my patronage of her books in the library. She learned a tough lesson: anything that goes on the Web can’t really be deleted.

Update: Alice Hoffman issued what is, in my opinion, a weak apology for her Twitter rant. Anytime someone starts out by saying “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” well, anything that follows just sounds insincere.

Second Update: If you want to see Alice Hoffman’s entire “Twitter meltdown,” download this PDF (Thanks, Steve!).

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New Look

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As you can see, I have changed the theme or template for this blog. I have wanted something more fun but still bookish for a while, and my old theme proved stubbornly difficult to work with sometimes. I think I have everything in its place now, but if you see something that needs to be fixed, please let me know.

In updating the theme, I have also enabled threaded comments, which means that if you want to reply to a comment, it will be clear that your comment is in reply to a comment rather than a post. I obtained the theme free from TemplateLite. I am good with code, but not so much with manipulating images and creating a whole theme from scratch.

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Merlin

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The Beguiling of MerlinYet again, it seems that King Arthur has become inspiration for a new work. The BBC ran the series Merlin in the UK last year, but it has only now reached the US. I just watched the first two episodes on Hulu. I didn’t hate it, and that’s a pretty ringing endorsement. Let me explain.

When I was a junior in college, I took Medieval Literature the same quarter as a special Topics in English class on Celtic Literature. The two often crossed, as when my Medieval Literature professor assigned Le Morte D’Arthur (volume II) while my Celtic Literature professor assigned The Mabinogion. Our version of The Mabinogion, like many others, includes not only the four branches of the Mabinogi, but also some early Welsh Arthurian Romances, such as “Culhwch and Olwen,” “The Lady of the Fountain,” and “Peredur son of Efrawg.” In these early tales, readers will meet some familiar characters, including Arthur himself, Gwenwhyfar (Guinevere), Gwalchmai (Gawain), Cei (Kay), Peredur (Percival), and many others. My Medieval Literature professor used to require outside reading (in addition to required texts), and he recommended Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. I didn’t read the entire book: just the parts about Arthur. This text also contains the story of King Lear (called Leir in this book, and possibly derived from the Welsh god Llŷr). I think I can definitively trace my interest in King Arthur to that quarter in winter 1991 when I took those classes. The cross-pollination of ideas served to make the subject much more interesting to me.

I am not as widely read in the subject as an expert, but for a layperson, I’ve read a lot. I know the canon. I really don’t like non-canonical Arthurian legend… unless it’s clever. For instance, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon happens to be my favorite Arthur novel precisely because Bradley ingeniously tells the story of Arthur through the eyes of the women in his life: his mother, his wife, and most importantly, his much maligned sister Morgan le Fay. I also really liked the TV movie Merlin, starring Sam Neill. That film told the story through the eyes of Merlin, as this new TV series does (after a fashion). I absolutely detested the film First Knight, which should have been wonderful: Sean Connery as Arthur and Julia Ormond as Guinevere. What could go wrong? Well, for starters, Richard Gere as Lancelot. Also, let’s not offend American sensibilities. Instead of including an important plot point involving incest—Mordred is often portrayed as the result of a Arthur’s seduction by one of his sisters—the character Malagant is introduced as an antogonist raping Guinevere’s country of Lyonesse. Whatever.

I am not sure why deviation from canon bothers me so much. I only know that it does. Merlin isn’t bad. It clearly isn’t period, but most King Arthur stories aren’t, even the great Le Morte D’Arthur, so period detail doesn’t bother me as much. Arthur stories have never been period because each period seeks to make an Arthur after its own image, I think. I find some of the casting a little weird. The choice of making Guinevere Morgana’s servant is baffling. The Renaissance faire geek in me doesn’t mind some of strange sets, either. I will keep watching. I discovered Hulu lets you subscribe to a show via RSS, which is probably something everyone out there but me already knew.

At any rate, I think it’s inspired me to pick up some Arthurian fiction I haven’t read and dip back into The Idylls of the King, which can’t be bad at all.

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Shakespeare and Modern Culture

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One of my best students gave me Shakespeare and Modern Culture as an end-of-the-year gift, noting that he knew how I liked Shakespeare. Clearly, Marjorie Garber has a throrough understanding of and love for Shakespeare as well.

I found the chapters on Othello and The Merchant of Venice quite interesting—perhaps even fascinating. The other chapters had flashes of interesting information here and there; I liked Garber’s references to Freud and found his interpretations of the plays interesting enough that I might try to track them down. His psychoanalysis of the characters in Macbeth particularly interested me, and as I teach that play, reading Freud’s analysis might come in handy.

However, I never felt like this book gelled for me. I found it odd that Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of King Lear received a passing reference (the author isn’t even noted except in the index, and the reference dropped in as though readers are expected to know what she’s talking about; lucky for me, I did, but would everyone who read this book know it?), while pages and pages were devoted to a MacBird, a much less well-known adaptation of Macbeth by Barbara Garson. Also puzzling is the fact that Garber says Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was published in 1996. Obviously I’m not an expert, so I looked this information up because it just didn’t seem right to me. Sure enough, I found it was published in 1966 (the movie appeared in 1990). Typo? Maybe, but it made me lose some confidence in her research. An Amazon reviewer found other factual errors I missed.

A personal pet peeve: the book has endnotes. I hate endnotes. If you need to footnote something, I prefer it be in the footer of the text. I will not flip back and forth between notes and the section I’m reading, so I wind up not reading the notes, and my guess is that any time a writer takes the time to provide annotations, it’s because they’re important. I just find the flipping back and forth too annoying. Of course, the choice of endnotes over footnotes may not be Garber’s choice, but her publisher’s.

I am not going to say this book was bad. I did learn some interesting things about the plays, but the book was not what I thought it would be. The dust jacket calls it “a magisterial new study whose premise is that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.” I didn’t find the book delivered on that promise. I would have appreciated a brief summary of the plays. Garber assumes an absolute familiarity with the text, and I confess it’s been too long since I read The Tempest and I’m not sure if I’ve read Coriolanus, particularly after reading this book (I sure don’t remember it), so those two chapters were difficult for me to understand in light of my lack of familiarity with the plays. I suppose it is Garber’s prerogative to assume familarity with the texts she discusses, but I thought brief summaries might make her own text more accessible. I also wish Garber had discussed more of Shakespeare’s comedies. In all, it was satisfactory, but not as good as I was hoping it would be. In fact, by the end, I just wanted to finish it so I could read something else. In general, I found the reviews at Goodreads to be spot on.

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Reading Like a Writer

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Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is billed as “a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them.” I think Prose does have some good advice for writers in the book, but more than that, this book is, as the blurb from USA Today indicates, “A Love letter to the pleasures of reading.” Prose points to excellent examples of dialogue and characterization. She favors a close reading approach to reading and enjoying literature.

Prose insists, rightly, that if you want to write, you need to be a reader, and she notes that it’s astonishingly true that many young writers are not reading. I have to admit I agree with Prose. I don’t understand why someone who wants to write wouldn’t be reading just about everything. Reading is a proper writer’s education. It was reading other books that made me think I could try to write them, and I just can’t imagine writing without reading.

In the interview at the end of the book, Prose notes, “One of the sad things that I think partly accounts for the decline of the audience for reading and books is that people aren’t being encouraged to read for pleasure” (8). Of book clubs, she says that “[T]hey do get people reading and talking about reading. But on the other hand, when you’re reading for a book club, the whole time you’re thinking, I have to have an opinion and I’m going to have to defend it to these people. The whole notion of being swept away by a book pretty much goes out the window” (8). I think she makes some valid points. I have a lot of students who are not readers. I have some students who become readers (and sometimes, you’d be surprised how little encouragement is needed). The key is that students are choosing to read for pleasure. That’s not to say I think we should do away with required reading. I happen to think sometimes, some real good comes from being required to read a book. Many of my students this year told me they were not looking forward to Frankenstein, but after they read it, they really liked it. Would they ever have picked it up on their own? Maybe not. I know I enjoyed some of the reading I was required to do in school (not all of it, surely). We can pull out the old saw about everything that is competing with reading nowadays, but I think that we have always had readers and nonreaders, even when there wasn’t as much to compete with. Prose thinks that the problem with required reading is often that “[T]eachers are teaching books that they themselves find boring to students who are bored by them. And they’re teaching them in a way that bores the students” (8-9). There’s some unfortunate truth to this observation. In some cases, curricula are so set in stone that teachers have no options about which books they teach. One fortunate aspect of my own teaching position is that I can select all the books my students will study. If teachers are allowed to select books they are passionate about, sometimes that passion transfers to the students. I’m not going to say they’ll always like required reading, but students are more apt to like required reading that the teacher so clearly enjoys.

One very interesting chapter in this book, “Learning from Chekhov,” examines the rules and advice writing teachers give students. Prose notes for each time she has told a student not to do something with writing, she finds an example in Chekhov where it works. I thought that chapter was interesting because it essentially says that the most important rule to know about writing is that there are no rules. It’s a somewhat frightening and liberating idea. What we can do (and should do, in Prose’s view) is use the masters as models.

Prose has some eclectic tastes in literature, and she mentioned a great many books I’d not heard of, much less read. She includes a list of recommended books that includes many of the greats of the Western canon in addition to some surprising choices I wouldn’t necessarily have thought would be on such a list. Examples include mainstays like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick, but some interesting choices include Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I had never heard of this novel, and thus it wouldn’t have been the usual choice for a Dickens novel, I should think. Prose is fond of the Russians, a proclivity that shines through almost every page of this book. I do find it helpful that Prose recommends certain translators for literature that isn’t written in English. It can be daunting to select which version to read when a book has been translated multiple times, and a little guidance is helpful.

I think people who truly love books and reading (especially English majors who live for this sort of thing) will enjoy Prose’s book, but I’m not sure it would be of any help to students who are trying to learn about literature or writing. Instead, I would recommend Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor or How to Read Novels Like a Professor.

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Characterization

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Yesterday I read the chapter “Character” in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, and she used examples from Jane Austen’s novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in order to illustrate characterization both through exposition and dialogue. I found myself agreeing with much of what Prose says in this chapter.  Of Austen’s characterization of Mr. John Dashwood and his wife:

Austen is more likely to create her men and women by telling us what they think, what they have done, and what they plan to do. What matters most is how Mr. Dashwood views his own good deed. In that marvelous barbed sentence in which everthing hinges on one word, then—”He then really though himself equal to it”—Austen hints at how long his generosity will last, how long he will continue to rise above himself. Mr. John Dashwood is thrilled by his charity, which, it should be emphasized, is in fact not magnanimity but fairness. He meditates on his benevolence with such self-regard and self-congratulation, with such acute awareness of how his actions will seem to others, and with so much unacknowledged regret and obsessivenss that we can easily imagine how strongly his resolve will withstand his wife’s suggestion that he may have been a bit hasty. (121-122)

The bit of characterization that Prose quotes from Sense and Sensibility occurs after Mr. John Dashwood has promised his father that he will take care of his stepmother and half sisters.

When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. He then really though himself equal to it. The prospect of four thousand a year, in addition to his present income, besides the remaining half of his own mother’s fortune, warmed his heart, and made him feel capable of generosity.—”Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds: It would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.”—He thought of it all day long, and for many days successively, and he did not repent. (qtd. in Prose 121)

From Pride and Prejudice, Prose quotes an early passage of dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet regarding Mrs. Bennet’s request that Mr. Bennet visit Mr. Bingley in order to introduce the family to the new resident of Netherfield and thereby increase the prospects that one of the five Bennet girls will marry him, at least in Mrs. Bennet’s mind. The characterization Austen accomplishes in this conversation is, in fact, one of the reasons the novel endeared itself to me early on. As Prose says,

The calm forbearance which Mr. Bennet answers his wife’s first question (“he replied that he had not”) provides and immediate and reasonbly accurate idea of his character. Driven to impatience, she says what he was expecting to hear: namely, that a rich young man has moved into the neighborhood. When Mrs. Bennet crows, “What a fine thing for our girls!” we can assume that Mr. Bennet knows the answer before he asks if their new neighbor is married or single. And he’s toying with his wife when he inquires, “How can it affect them?” (qtd. in Prose 127)

Later, Prose comments on the subtle characterization of Elizabeth Bennet, whom we haven’t met in person, through her relationship to each of her parents.

The next paragraph establishes Lizzy’s role in the family; she’s neither so beautiful as Jane nor so pleasant as Lydia, but she is gifted with an intelligence that endears her to her father. Austen invites us to consider a general truth that we may have observed about what sort of girl becomes her father’s favorite in a family of daughters. Elizabeth’s intelligence means more to her father than it does to her mother, who is perhaps more attuned to the fact that intelligence may not be a virtue in a young woman whom one hopes to marry off. (127-128)

Prose makes some excellent points about characterization in the whole chapter, using other examples from novels with which I am not familiar. As I read, I thought about the fact that all of my favorite novels had excellent characters and characterization at their heart. Even more than plot, characterization seems to be what appeals to me as a reader. The books I’ve devoured most quickly and enjoy re-reading universally have good characters—people I would like to know (and people I wouldn’t!). They are people who seem very real to me. The heart of a good novel, to me, is its characters. I have actually enjoyed books that are not written well if the characters are real to me in some way (Twilight series).

Here is my short list of books with excellent characters:

I’m fully aware of the wide range of literary merit displayed in this list, but one thing I think all the books do have in common is that they all have memorable, well-drawn characters.

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Something Rotten

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Jasper Fforde’s novel Something Rotten is the fourth in his Thursday Next series. Famed Literary Detective and Head of Jurisfiction Thursday Next misses the real world and decides to leave fiction to see what she can do about uneradicating her husband, Landen Parke-Laine. Thursday learns in this installment that things are indeed much weirder than we can know.

While I have enjoyed the entire series, I found this book more confusing than the others. The various threads of the story don’t intertwine until the end, and by that time, I had forgotten enough of the details that I was still confused. Of course, I’m a slow reader, and it’s partly because of that fact that I had difficulty putting the ending together. A reader who finishes more quickly than I might fare better. Fforde is a book nerd’s writer. His allusions to literature and history and enjoyable and entertaining. I liked the book enough that I’ll continue to read more Fforde books, but I’m going to take a break from Fforde for a while and read something else.

My next book will be Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Of course, I’m still working on Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White on my iPhone. Because Francine Prose autographed my copy of this book, I don’t want to write in it, so I’ll post my reflections as I read here.

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Diversity in Reading

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Via Bookgirl, here is an examination of how inclusive my own reading has been:

  1. Name the last book by a female author that you’ve read.
    Persuasion by Jane Austen. I finished it on April 18.
  2. Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you’ve read.
    Wow, it has been a really long time since I read anything by an African or African-American author. Looks like it was Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying in July 2007.
  3. Name one from a Latino/a author.
    That’s going to be really hard. Probably Judith Ortiz Cofer’s novel The Line of the Sun, and I’ll bet I read it in 1991 or 1992. Yikes. It’s no consolation, I suppose, that works by Isabelle Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Laura Esquivel are on my list if I haven’t actually picked them up, right?
  4. How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?
    This is bad, too, but probably Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies back in 2006.
  5. What about a GLBT writer?
    Probably The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde in July 2007, unless, that is, I’ve read an author not knowing whether or not he/she was GLBT.
  6. Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you’re feeling lucky?
    Ha, ha! That one’s just cruel. My book club read Reading Lolita in Tehran, but I had already read it, so I didn’t do a re-read. I read it in November 2005.
  7. Any other “marginalized” authors you’ve read lately?
    I guess maybe Native American writer Louise Erdrich. Her novel The Plague of Doves was one of my favorites last year.

So how about you? How diverse is your reading?

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Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

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Lexcycle announced today that it has been acquired by Amazon. Lexcycle is the developer of the popular iPhone app Stanza. While Lexcycle is currently promising no “changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition,” I’m not sure I believe that. Am I still going to be able to download books for free from Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks? Why would Amazon want to continue developing Stanza, which could be seen as a direct competitor with their own Kindle app? I don’t have anything against Amazon, but it has been great to be able to download free classics like The Woman in White, Persuasion, and A Tale of Two Cities (among others I plan to read) in a perfectly readable format for free. After all, I can find them online for free. The format in Stanza makes the text more readable than using a computer to read. I would hate to see Stanza change, but I don’t see how it won’t. It doesn’t make sense to me for Amazon not to at least stop offering free books—they’re all about making a profit from reading, aren’t they?

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A Literary Meme

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I discovered this meme through So Many Books, who ascribes it to Litlove.

  1. What author do you own the most books by?

    J. K. Rowling. I have three copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, two of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, two of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, one of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I *think* two each of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and three of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We were unable to share around my house, and some of them are audio books or different versions.

  2. What book do you own the most copies of?

    I don’t own more than three copies of any book, so I guess the aforementioned Harry Potter books.

  3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

    No. That’s an idiotic grammar rule concocted to make English work more like Latin. English, however, is not Latin, so it’s silly to go through machinations like avoiding ending sentences with prepositions and splitting infinitives to make it work like Latin.

  4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

    Jamie Fraser in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Also, maybe, just a little, Nick Carraway. If I were a little younger, I might like Edward Cullen, too.

  5. What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children)?

    The Harry Potter series. With so little variance in my bookish life, I’m afraid this meme will bore you.

  6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

    Let’s see, that was fourth grade for me. I’d say I was probably still very into Judy Blume’s Superfudge, which definitely was my favorite in third when I was nine.

  7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

    The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber (review here).

  8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

    That’s kind of tough because I have enjoyed a lot of them. From April 2008-April 2009, then? The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (review here). It was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Great, great book.

  9. If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

    Probably To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby. Or maybe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I’m influenced by the fact that I’m an English teacher, and I consider each an essential text.

  10. Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

    I honestly don’t know. I know what I like, and I kind of keep track of awards, but ultimately, I’m not sure they mean all that much. Too many deserving authors don’t ever win, and too many undeserving ones (in my opinion) have won awards (not necessarily Nobel, but you get the idea).

  11. What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

    I thought after reading the Thursday Next series that it might be a fun movie, but the moviemakers would never do it justice.

  12. What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

    Because it’s on my mind from a previous question, A Plague of Doves. It’s a multigenerational saga that would not translate well to film. Film doesn’t have the nuance.

  13. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

    I’m sure I’ve had one, but now that I’ve been asked, I can’t remember one.

  14. What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

    I tried to read Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower. It was recommended to me by my English department chair years ago. I can’t believe it. If I didn’t finish it, does it count as read? Yuck. OK, let’s be fair and pick one I finished. Highland Desire by Joyce Carlow. Blech. Romance novel. Out of print. I had to comb through my old Amazon reviews to recall the title of that one.

  15. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

    I suppose it would be Moby Dick, although reading it in small installments through a DailyLit subscription made it easier.

  16. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

    That I’ve seen as opposed to read? Well, A Comedy of Errors, I guess.

  17. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?Either. Neither. Both. It depends. I really like the British.

    18. Roth or Updike?

    Never read novels by either, but I read “A&P” by Updike. OK. I don’t feel qualified to pick.

  18. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

    I haven’t read Dave Eggers, but I do enjoy Sedaris.

  19. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

    All three, please. However, if I have to pick, I can’t do without Shakespeare.

  20. Austen or Eliot?

    Never read Eliot, but I love dear Aunt Jane. I’m sure I’d feel the same way even if I’d read Eliot, so I’m going with Austen.

  21. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

    I actually don’t think I have really embarrassing gap, but I haven’t read enough Dickens to be as old as I am.

  22. What is your favorite novel?

    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Well, really the series as one long book.

  23. Play?

    King Lear or Othello. Tough to pick.

  24. Poem?

    Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred?” as opposed to “Here on the edge of hell / Stands Harlem.”

  25. Essay?

    “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift.

  26. Short story?

    Right now, at this moment, it’s “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, but that one changes a lot.

  27. Work of nonfiction?

    At the moment, either The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester or How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

  28. Who is your favorite writer?

    J. K. Rowling. Also love Jane Austen and William Shakespeare a lot.

  29. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

    Is Dan Brown overrated? If so, him.

  30. What is your desert island book?

    The Harry Potter series. We’re calling that one book.

  31. And… what are you reading right now?

    Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (which I am really enjoying) and Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde.

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