1.       What’s your favorite book you’ve had read to you?

 Audiobook – The Nine  by Jeffrey Toobin

 Book I read aloud with my husband – Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

 2.       What book (or series of books) would you like to see made into a film?

 Anne McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern series.  I think with today’s CGI capabilities, movie producers could do justice to her creation.

 3.       We often complain about movies not being as good as the books they are based upon, but what’s a movie that was as good as (or better than) its book?

 By far, Contact  the movie was far better than Contact the book if only because Dr. Eleanor Arroway was much more sympathetic and likable a character as played by Jodie Foster. Her literary incarnation was bitchy and overcompensating for being a woman trying to make her way in a man’s world. Although I figure that was typical of many female astrophysicists Carl Sagan knew, I like the movie depiction of her quest for extraterrestrial life much better than the novelization.

 4.       Songs often take us back to specific times in our life or remind us of specific people. What book does that for you and what’s the explanation?

 It’s odd but I have a very specific memory related to a book and I can’t remember what the book was. I remember being at my grandmother’s house in Charlotte (so it must have been summertime about 30 years ago) and sitting in her black leather recliner reading a book. It was one of those books with animal characters and I vividly remember being disturbed by a passage that was about a little bird that was trying to learn how to fly. It kept falling and making a thud when it hit the ground, and it bothered me so much I skipped that part. It seems strange to me that I would remember reading this but I have no idea what book it was from.

 5.       What book do you know well enough to quote from once in a while?

 I usually quote poetry or movies, but the one quote I find myself coming back to recently in regards to my office life is “Happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karinina, Leo Tolstoy)