Reader's Snapshot - Gayle Forman

I am very honoured to have Gayle onboard this week. I reviewed If I Stay back in January and since then I have been eagerly anticipating the response to its release. (Read my review here.)

Which book is memorable from your teen years?
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, though, technically, that was from my tween years, because I think I was 11 or 12 when I read it. It was the first book I read that pulled me in by the collar and socked me in the stomach and made me cry (and had the same effect on me when I re-read it over the years). It stands up over time. It's also, funnily enough, one of those books that's a children's book that really isn't a children's book if you think about it.

Describe your high school English teacher in three words...
Gothic. Mysterious. English (literally).

Your book of the moment?
I'm actually having a hard time finding something I adore lately, which is only fair, I suppose because the last 18 months have brought me such a wealth of fantastic reads (everything from Twilight to Sherman Alexie to Junot Diaz to Sara Zarr to Peter Cameron) so maybe I have a dry spell coming. I read the Wally Lamb and didn't love it. I'd really love to love something. I'd love some suggestions.

What do you use to mark your page when reading?
Many things: Magazine subscription blowouts, envelopes, bills, postcards, stubs of papers, if the book's a hardcover, the inside flap of the book jacket. But my husband is a librarian, who has broken me of the very bad habit of dog-earing pages (which I now consider a sacrilege) and laying a book down to the open page, which I now only do if I fall asleep while reading.

Favourite place to read?
Bed!

Favourite word?
Chapter 1.

Favourite book store?
I wish my groovy Brooklyn neighborhood actually had a groovy cafe bookstore like Washington DC's Politics & Prose or LA's Book Soup. We don't. We have a cavernous Barnes & Noble. So I don't really have a favorite local bookstore. Just a longing for one.

Character you wish you had created?
Hmm. While I covet plenty of writers' careers, I don't covet their characters because if I like the characters that much, I'm just too plain grateful for their existence to wish I'd created them. Oh, wait, I know. I wish I'd created the character David Sedaris. Except he's real. Then I guess what I'm saying is that I wish I WERE David Sedaris.

Bonus Question - Which fictional town would you rather spend the week in? Dillon, Texas or Sunnydale, California? What would you do?
No question, Sunnydale. I love FNL (Friday Night Lights) and all but football players and rednecks scare me far more than vampires and hellions. I'd hang out with Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles and the crew, maybe sing some songs if it were a musical time in Sunnydale—and then I'd kick some ass!

So Gayle needs some reading suggestions, hit her with them here!