Voracious reader and writer, and when I'm not doing that, backpacking/hiking, rough foreign travel (none of that Western European trash), cooking, growing veggies and herbs, curry parties, Trivial Pursuit (Master Game-Genus Edition... where the lit. questions aren't about comic books and the history questions don't reference Madonna), my porch swing, travel photography, rolling my own sushi after drinking two glasses of wine, diving for frisbees, kosher salt, olive oil, George Michael karaoke, Central American history, Hoegaarden, watching the original Planet of the Apes on mute to 90's music, cheeseburgers, black-eyed susans, This American Life, and feeding the potbellied pigs at Maymont. There are rumors circulating that I enjoy claiming be to Catherine the Great to complete strangers at bars, but that's all hearsay.
"If you've ever wondered how fundamentalist Christians can be so sure about sex, evolution--everything--in an uncertain world, this novel is essential reading. Kelly Kerney has created a coming-of-age story that goes far beyond her protagonist's journey from faith to blasphemy to lived experience. In so doing, she holds a mirror up to the divided nation we've become. An achievement that is as lively as it is timely." --Steve Tomasula, Iowa Prize winner and most recently the author of The Book of Portraiture.
Iron and Wine, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Fruit Bats, The Cure, Petshop Boys, George Michael, Led Zeppelin, Gillian Welch, Buena Vista Social Club, Jim Croce, The Butchies, The Postal Service, Al Green, Ani DiFranco when she's not talking, Sondre Lerche, Hussalonia, Neil Young, Mirah, Smashing Pumpkins, Neutral Milk Hotel, Blur, Leonard Cohen, T-Rex, Leona Naess, Cash... noticing a pattern?
I hate "Dead Poets' Society."
With the money I'd spend buying a television, I could buy one-tenth of a plane ticket to Bolivia. Or a really good camping stove.
Fiction: anything Nabokov, Melville, Maupassant, Carver, Joyce, Richard Yates, Ralph Ellison, Ishiguro, Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. Also Isaac Babel, Hemingway (Nick Adams stories), Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot!), Arundhati Roy, Italo Calvino, Thomas Hardy, Graham Greene, and Andre Gide. Lee Seigel's "Love in a Dead Language" is the funniest book I've ever read. The only book that made me cry is Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road." I think it's a shame that we force 7th graders to read "Moby Dick," subsequently ruining it for them because they cannot yet appreciate its wit and biting satire. How do you get someone who's read "Moby Dick" once and hated it to read it again? That's a question I turn over in my head every day. I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, for being less hopeful. Emerson to Thoreau, for not being an idiot. Poetry: August Kleinzahler, James Wright, Sharon Olds, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Louise Gluck, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, A.R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, Coleridge, Rilke, Issa, Milton, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (to whom I made a fool of myself a few years back). I am addicted the The New Yorker and Harper's.
Dani Rado, for teaching me that anything is legal if it's in a canteen.