But I also have several books that straddle academia and popular culture: I loved Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse,” and David Brooks’s “The Social Animal” (and Elliot Aronson’s book, also called “The Social Animal,” which was my favorite book in college).

But I also have several books that straddle academia and popular culture: I loved Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse,” and David Brooks’s “The Social Animal”.

But I also have several books that straddle academia and popular culture: I loved Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse”.

But I also have several books that straddle academia and popular culture: I loved Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?I love reading unusual travelogues — Pico Iyer’s “Video Night in Kathmandu”; Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between”; Ismail Kadare’s “The File on H.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?I love reading unusual travelogues — Pico Iyer’s “Video Night in Kathmandu”; Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between”.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?I love reading unusual travelogues — Pico Iyer’s “Video Night in Kathmandu”.

Who’s your favorite fictional hero or heroine?Three of my favorite books focus on characters who have come to the States under difficult circumstances: the Sudanese refugee of Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What”; Bosnian refugee Jozef Pronek in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Nowhere Man”; and the Dominican family in Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

Who’s your favorite fictional hero or heroine?Three of my favorite books focus on characters who have come to the States under difficult circumstances: the Sudanese refugee of Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What”; Bosnian refugee Jozef Pronek in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Nowhere Man”.

Who’s your favorite fictional hero or heroine?Three of my favorite books focus on characters who have come to the States under difficult circumstances: the Sudanese refugee of Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What”.

but my favorite book is “Patrimony,” Roth’s nonfiction account of the last years of his father’s life.