Then:
One of my first recollections of reading as a kid was in 2nd grade when I discovered The Bailey School Kids, Goosebumps, and the Chip Hilton sports series. I enjoyed all of these books so much that I won an AR reading contest at my elementary school and was rewarded with a limo ride to the local Pizza Hut with the other kids who won in their classes. My grandfather was a huge inspiration for my reading. I spent a lot of my summer evenings in his office reading while he worked on writing books on local history and Civil War battles. Among these books were Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Peter Capstick’s Safari: The Last Adventure, Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, as well as most of the Grimm brother’s fairy tales. He also managed to talk me into writing one story every summer, which made me feel like I could be a writer, like him. When I approached middle school I started getting into books like The Chocolate War, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby. Later, in high school, I remember really liking Edgar Allen Poe (especially The Pit and the Pendulum), John Steinbeck, and one book that really stuck with me throughout my life was The Myth of Sisyphus by philosopher Albert Camus.
Now:
I still read a lot today and enjoy a pretty wide array of different genres. In my early twenty’s I discovered Jack Kerouac (Dharma Bums) and the entire Beatnik Generation. From there, I discovered poetry and read a lot of Charles Bukowski (who my cat, Hank, is named after), Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams, to name a few. Also around this time, I got really into hiking and spent most of my free time traveling the country visiting National Parks and Forests, which led me to reading a lot of stuff by outdoorsmen and environmental enthusiast, Edward Abby (Desert Solitaire & The Monkey Wrench Gang). My degree in college led me to discovering/rediscovering a lot of great writers/philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir, and William James. I never really know how to answer the question about who my favorite author is or what my favorite books is, but I’d have to put Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov), Aldous Huxley (Island), or John Updike (Rabbit series) up at the top of my list. For short stories, I would have to say J.D. Salinger’s 9 Stories or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance. You can also never go wrong with reading anything by Hemingway or Carson McCullers. If I could convince anyone to make an easy, but significant, positive change in their life, it would be to set aside 30 minutes to an hour each day for reading.
