More zombie Newsweek material!
Back from the dead, an interview. This week the NYT book review ran a glowing review of Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built. It's one guy's meditation on how books molded him. I did an interview with Spufford when the book came out in England, but the piece never made it into the mag. The best bits:

Would you have grown into a different person if you'd not had copies of The Chronicles of Narnia?
Yes. I think the books you read are parents of your biography, and you would be a different person if that silent part of your biography which happened when you were reading was different. When I first read the Narnia books I felt as if I had taken ahold of a live wire. But then the Narnia books did something I particularly wanted which was to let me into another world. I came from a family with a very ill sister, and I had a great need for books to give me a way to turn away from emotional reality into something rich enough and strong enough to compete with. And Narnia books were ideal for that, because CS Lewis is such a good writer about yearning, because he felt such a lot of yearning himself.
Does your book focus more on fantasy than, say, Catcher in the Rye?
Catcher in the Rye is in there. I've got a bit in the last chapter about teenage reading and lone gunmen, and something about why it is that the men who shot Reagan and John Lennon were both great Catcher in the Rye fans. I was always a reader of many books, but I was fascinated by these guys who were intense repetitious readers of one book. What astonished me was the idea that they thought it was them in The Catcher in the Rye. Which is weird, because what The Catcher in the Rye is about is being on the loose, ricocheting about in that bewildeting space between childhood and adulthood when you're getting it wrong all the time and you're constantly coming to snap judgements of people and then revising them a minute later. Holden Caufield decides people are phony and then decides they're not about every 15 seconds. The idea of looking to that for certainty I found magnetizingly weird. Every teenage boy who reads The Catcher in the Rye feels a bit like Holden Caufield, but usually you feel that he's being a lost boy more thoroughly than you are. The idea that there's something stable in your resemblance to him--you have to be really fucked to believe that.
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One thing I do believe very strongly about children's reading is that you ought to let it belong to children themselves. You can leave interesting bread crumbs in their path, but you're not supposed to give away the idea that it's good for them, otherwise they'll sod off and do something else. It's an indulgence and it's a private world and you are stealing something from a child if you pre-empt the privacy of it.
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During the great current boom in children's reading because of the Harry Potter books, I sometimes feel very skeptical about those characterizations of reading which make it purely and only and ever a good thing. It isn't. Bring an eager child to a book and you have a situation in which the book is going to have imaginative power, and imaginative power is not necessarily a sweet nice thing. If you're going to think that children ought to read, then you're going to think that children ought to read stuff that will worry them or disturb them, because that's the price of reading things that will delight them and amaze them.

Coincidentally, I have a book to get to. G'night.