Seeing as Vanity Fair made popular the party game where a guest (most famously Marcel Proust) is asked to answer a series of illuminating questions and seeing as Unity Books stocks Vanity Fair and seeing as what other people are reading is always of interest (as an avenue to further reading oneself), I hereby introduce: The Reader - a selection of questions asked of various persons aimed at unearthing their literary habits and, as is always the case with great literature, some hint of what's going on between the lines...

Elizabeth Knox

Elizabeth Knox (Acclaimed author of The Vintler's Luck, the Dreamhunter Duet & winner of  the 2009 Sir Julius Vogel Award for NZ Sci Fi & Fantasy for The Invisible Road) praises Dunnett, Dante & Austen...

Which book caused you to love reading?
Tales of the Greek Heroes  by Roger Lancelyn Green. I got it out of the Wadestown library when I was eight.

What are you currently reading & how did you come across the book?
The Fat Man and Infinity. Cronicas by Antonio Lobo Antunes. My super-reader husband put this into my hands.

What is the book you have re-read the most?
Persuasion by Jane Austen

Favourite book to movie adaptation?
Some of my favourite films are adaptations, but of so-so books, like The Godfather. I figure for this you have to like both. So I'm going to choose a TV adaptation – the BBC's North and South adapted from the book by Elizabeth Gaskell. I loved both.

What books are next to your bed?
Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo books. I just finished The Lymond Chronicles and am deeply in Dunnett.

Favourite literary quote?
If I have to choose-Ulysses in Canto XXVI of Dante's Inferno, transl. Robert Pinsky

Not fondness for my son, nor any claim
Of reverence for my father, nor love I owed
Penelope, to please her, could overcome

My longing for experience of the world,
Of human vices and virtue. But I sailed out
On the deep open seas, accompanied

By that small company that still had not
Deserted me, in a single ship. One coast
I saw, and then another...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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