I've just noticed that each one of my updates is getting successively earlier. Soon I will have to update this blog in the middle of the night. That will be unpleasant.

7. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series: Transcendental literature this is not, but what it is is a series of books that I was obsessed with in elementary school. They got me reading on a regular basis. I can attribute being an English major and writer to being a reader, and I can attribute being a reader to Goosebumps.

8. Dave Barry: For most of middle school I was obsessed with Dave Barry. My family had a subscription to The Washington Post at the time, and every weekend I would read his article at the back of the Post magazine. Reading those pieces, I realized that writing could be something fun. That it could make people laugh. And that’s when I realized that I wanted to be a writer.

9. Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor: I watched Fight Club in high school. I think I knew it was based on a book, but maybe not. Then, freshman year of college, I got into Chuck Palahniuk. Survivor was my first book. I used the bus system to go from campus to the Books-a-Million off campus, picked this up, returned to the dorm, and read the first hundred pages in one night. At the time, I had never read anything like it. The style, the story, the fact that the page numbers were counting down… A huge influence on my writing.

10. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: There is not a single play that is like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It’s philosophy without being pretentious or boring. It’s also philosophy that’s accessible (even if it’s only the second or third viewing where things start to click). It’s also incredibly funny. Tom Stoppard is fucking smart in this play, and I wish I could write something this smart.

11. David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster: I was incredibly surprised and sad when I heard the news that Wallace killed himself last fall. I’ve never been a huge fan of his fiction, but his essays are top-notch. I strive to have a vocabulary as robust as his. And yet, he never seems to be showing off. Instead, he’s just using words that other people seem to not use. I didn’t have to run to the dictionary every five minutes to look up a definition, but, when I finished reading, I felt like my vocabulary had grown.

12. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: Near the end of college, I started getting into post-modernism. This book is my favorite post-modernist novel. A brilliant story brilliantly executed: the first chapter opens with Italo Calvino addressing you, the reader, asking you to get comfy. The second chapter is the first chapter of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Right as you get into the story, it cuts off. Chapter three is about you, the reader, and how your copy of the book seems to be defective. So you go to the bookstore where you try to get a new copy, only to find that all the other copies of the book have the same defect. Somehow you stumble upon a new book. Chapter four is the first chapter in that new book. But there’s a defect with that book as well... and so on, each chapter alternating in that fashion. Also, I’d give an extraneous organ for a convergence as cool as the one at the end of this novel.