1. What role have libraries played in your life?

"My children and I are at the library at least once a week. I am a fast reader and read voraciously - for work and also to take my mind away from work. I think books are treasures in our midst - and to be able to walk into a library and sample, taste, and check them out adventurously, for free, is one of life's great gifts. I think libraries are places of quiet unselfconscious joy, for this reason."

2. What was your favorite childhood book?

"My favorite childhood book was The Secret Garden. It's now one of my 13-year-old daughter's favorite books."

3. Who is your favorite fictional character?

"That's a hard one. There are endless fictional characters I love living with for a while (the duration of the book they're in) without loving, as in having them as a favorite."

4. Who are the three authors you think everyone should be required to read-which books would you start with?

"This answer is quite different at different points of my life. Right now (though I'll change my mind as soon as I write this) maybe Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet or The Book of Hours; Everett Fox's translation, The Five Books of Moses; and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible."

5. If you couldn’t write, what other job would you like to have?

"I love my interviews with scientists of all kinds, from physicists to geneticists to an "acoustic biologist" I interviewed recently who studies the songs of whales and the calls of elephants. In another life perhaps I would have been a contented scientist."