What do you plan to read next?I need to read Pamela Bannos’s biography of the photographer Vivian Maier for the two-person book club.

Beginning in fourth or fifth grade, I fell hard for Lois Lowry’s Anastasia books, and Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” and I really loved Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club series.

I loved Mildred D. Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” and Wilson Rawls’s “Where the Red Fern Grows.” As a kid, I loved books that made me cry.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?I loved Mildred D. Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” and Wilson Rawls’s “Where the Red Fern Grows.” As a kid, I loved books that made me cry.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?After I had meningitis, my friend Mike Rugnetta gave me Elaine Scarry’s extraordinary book “The Body in Pain,” which I found extremely helpful. Scarry articulated for me part of what I found (and find) so awful about physical pain: Pain resists and evades and at times even destroys language. As Virginia Woolf put it, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”

My favorite novels about conjoined twins (or formerly conjoined twins) are “Sister Mine,” by Nalo Hopkinson, and “God’s Fool,” by Mark Slouka.

My favorite novels about conjoined twins (or formerly conjoined twins) are “Sister Mine,” by Nalo Hopkinson, and “God’s Fool,” by Mark Slouka.

How do you organize your books?I own a book called “The New York Public Library Guide to Organizing a Home Library” and I do exactly what it tells me to do.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?At least according to Herodotus, the Persian emperor Xerxes I was marching his army through a forest when he came across a sycamore tree so beautiful “that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his soldiers to guard it.” This will not surprise anyone who has ever seen a great sycamore tree, of course, but still. (I learned this from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”)

Before my wife and I started dating, we had a two-person book club. We read Toni Morrison and Philip Roth and fell in love little by little. There’s a line in “The Human Stain” that we both underlined when we read it: “The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.” Over 15 years later, that’s still the pleasure.

I also often recommend to adults “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing,” by M. T. Anderson, and “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks,” by E. Lockhart.

Which young adult books would you recommend to people who don’t usually read Y.A.?I never thought about writing for teenagers until I was 22 and read “Speak,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, and “Monster,” by Walter Dean Myers.

Which young adult books would you recommend to people who don’t usually read Y.A.?I never thought about writing for teenagers until I was 22 and read “Speak,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, and “Monster,” by Walter Dean Myers.