Author Bio
I grew in San Diego, California, but from the age of about seven on, my imagination lived in the world of books, which seemed equally real to me. I was one of those kids who'd rather read than play four-square during recess and I became notorious for my secret reading during class time. I would get so absorbed in the story that I wouldn't even hear the teacher call my name!
Now I live in New York, and I read (and write) for a living. I'm the staff book critic at Salon.com, and I've written reviews, essays and author profiles for the New York Times Book Review (where I had a column for two years), the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker and other publications. My book, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventure in Narnia, is the result my effort to connect my adult reading self with the reader I was as a child. C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia were my favorites when I was a girl, but as I grew up and learned more about books and the world, my thoughts and feelings about them changed dramatically.
I think I differ from other literary critics in that I'm even more interested in reading -- why we do it and what it means to us -- than I am in writing. I want to understand all of this better, and that's a prime motivation for my own work. I believe reading is an experience that offers rewards that can't be found in anything else, and hope that my work helps other readers discover the depths and breadth of that experience.
The books that affected me most as a child were fiction: the Narnia books, of course, but also fantasy novels by E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper, plus many, many more. I read so much adult fiction in the course of my work that it would be hard to list any definitive favorites, but I always pick up a new Haruki Murakami novel with particular delight.
I also love to read the work of other critics and have learned much from them. Oddly enough, two film critics, Pauline Kael and David Thomson, spring to mind first of all. Kael because her writing is so lively and vernacular -- she proves what many literary critics fail to understand, that you can be smart without being stuffy or pretentious. Thomson showed me how autobiographical material can and sometimes should be included in a critic's work; books and movies change how we think and feel about ourselves, and this is one of the things that makes them powerful. Some literary critics I admire are Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden and, of course, C.S. Lewis, whose wonderfully generous, erudite and vivid criticism was the most wonderful surprise I encountered while researching The Magician's Book.