![]() Does it hold up to my current taste? Probably not. I liked Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high. I read a couple of chapters a year: spreading it out! Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is such a bounty I can’t resist, though. Plus I’m finding her Tao stuff pretty cool these days. I went back when I was researching short novels for The Nickel Boys, and was finally able to understand her flawed utopias. I dug Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, but couldn’t hack The Lathe of Heaven at 11 years of age. Novels could be oddball, form-wise, and also have a big body count. (I previously wanted to write Spider-Man.) I liked the chronological jumps, the inserts of news reports, interviews and scholarly texts. ![]() ![]() The book that made me want to be a writerĪlso in seventh grade, I read Stephen King’s Carrie and thought novels might be where it’s at. ![]() In seventh grade English class we read the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and I thought: here’s a Black weirdo who writes maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me. Systems, rebel forces, counter-histories, a little bit of hope – that you could cram so much of the world from page to page was exhilarating to discover. I was 19 when I underwent my big Pynchon summer and dived into Gravity’s Rainbow. ![]()
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