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October 22, 2009

One Question


Today's Booking Through Thursday Question is a good one. If you could ask a favorite author, alive or dead, one question...who would you ask and what would it be?

Doesn't that just start the wheels turning? Now I haven't gone looking up anyone else's answers to this question yet but I'll bet the majority are for the deceased. Today's authors do so many interviews and book tours that it's not actually that hard to find information on them. Well, except maybe for Pynchon. And even he's been on the Simpson's for crying out loud.

I also imagine there will be many Shakespeare questions. How many did you write? About those sonnets... That kind of thing.

I've also been lucky to have actually met and talked to some of my favorite authors and illustrators. Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Gary Paulsen, Lawrence Block, Melissa Bank, Russell Banks, Andrei Codrescu, Tom Wolfe, Lawrence Yep, Joanna Cole, David Sedaris, David Shannon, John Green, Jerry Spinnelli, Frank McCourt, Jerry Pinkney, Steven Kellog, Lloyd Alexander, Mo Willems and more. I worked in bookstores and I'm a big book geek, so what did you expect?

But I guess if I had just one question to ask one favorite author, I'd like to be sitting in a rocking chair next to Samuel Langhorne Clemens around the time he's finishing up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I'd like to ask, "Um, why don't you go ahead and take some time to look at that ending one more time?"

I'm just saying.