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!

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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