We’re kicking off National Library Week with Anne Rice!! Below is a wonderful Q&A with Anne. We love her first memory of going to the library. Calling a library a “treasure house” is a wonderful way to describe a library. Anne also tells us about her latest novel The Wolf Gift.
RH LIBRARY: My first memory of being in a library is?
ANNE RICE: My first memory is my Dad taking me to the children’s library of the main New Orleans library in New Orleans. It was a big old Greek Revival Style building at Lee Circle in New Orleans, and we could easily get there by a long walk on St. Charles Avenue or by riding the famous St. Charles Street car, which cost seven cents in those days. The Children’s Section was in the basement and you went down a flight of stairs. I found it magical from the start, a treasure house of marvelous children’s books on mythology and prehistoric beasts. I totally loved it. Ever after that my sister, Alice, and I went several times a week to the library, and library books filled our house growing up. I don’t think either one of us ever visited a bookstore until we were teenagers. There simply was no bookstore that we knew. The library was a wonderful part of our lives.
RH LIBRARY: Why are libraries important?
ANNE RICE: Libraries are vital; they are clean well lighted places where people can be in the company of books of all kinds for hours on end, in silence, and in safety. I cannot stress how important they are. When I was a young mother in San Francisco, I got away to the neighborhood branch library for the most blissful visits, where I would do research on a novelist I was reading (Flaubert), or examine the latest books, or delve into an historical subject. I cannot tell you how I relied on that beautiful branch library. It was on Taraval Avenue in San Francisco, and coincidentally on a street car line just like the great New Orleans library of my childhood. I loved it with all my heart. Later on we moved to Berkeley, California, and I loved the main library there. I would take my daughter in a stroller to the library and check out fabulous books on all subjects, books I could never have afforded. I had a canvas sack on the stroller to transport those treasure troves home and back.
RH LIBRARY: What was the best book you remember checking out of the library and loving?
ANNE RICE: Books about prehistoric animals were my early favorites; also books on Greek mythology written for children. I fell headlong into the world of Greek mythology at the library and never grew tired of it. But the most memorable experience was reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in the school library in high school. I read the whole novel in after school sessions in that library.
RH LIBRARY: If you were a character in a book who would you be?
ANNE RICE: I’d be the god Apollo.
RH LIBRARY: Is there anything you’d like to share with librarians about your current book?
ANNE RICE: My current novel, The Wolf Gift, is a novel about a young man who becomes a werewolf and has to find out what that means. Like all my novels, it is being offered to an adult audience, but kids are going to want to read it. Kids as young as eleven email me about my novels, especially my vampire novels, and many times readers tell me that they started reading my books at nine or ten or eleven. So when the kids ask for an adult book, please be kind and open to their reading it. When I was a kid I snuck into the adult section all the time and read voraciously of the adult fare.
If you would like to enter our Anne Rice Book Giveaway simply fill out our entry form.
Love Anne Rice books! In high school I worked for 4 1/2 years at our local library and I don’t think there was ever a day that I didn’t walk out of there with 2 or more books! 🙂 Libraries are the most important places to go, it also helps when they provide us with wonderful talent such as Anne Rice.