Perhaps it’s the British-sounding name or maybe his epic subject matter — warring royals, the stuff of his wildly popular “A Game of Thrones,” now an HBO series. In any event, most people are gobsmacked to learn that George R.R. Martin, often hailed as the second coming of J.R.R. Tolkien, is a son of New Jersey.

“I’m from Bayonne, born and bred,” says Martin, whose father was a longshoreman. “That was all the world I knew before I went off to college.” After what some fans considered an obscenely long interval, Martin recently came out with “A Dance With Dragons,” the fifth in his series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” He’s a little sensitive about the time between books: “I do a lot of things besides ‘Ice and Fire,’ so the people who are enjoying that should try my older novels, like ‘Fevre Dream.’ Just as I read in a lot of genres, I like to write in a lot of genres, too.” Here’s what’s in his library.

— Barbara Hoffman

Have Space Suit — Will Travel

by Robert Heinlein

I’ve read pretty much read all of Heinlein, and it all began with this, the first science-fiction book I ever read. A friend of my mother’s gave me a hard copy of this for Christmas. Up ’til then, I read comic books religiously but hadn’t read any science fiction. We were poor, so for a decade it was the only hardcover I owned.

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of course it appeals to the romantic in me. I read a lot of stuff beside science fiction. I read it first in college, and I still feel it’s one of the greatest novels in the English language — especially Fitzgerald’s last lines about beating back into the past.

The Accursed Kings series

by Maurice Druon

If you like my “Ice and Fire,” I think you’d love this. Druon doesn’t have the dragons my books have, but he certainly has the politics, poisonings, intrigues and affairs. To my great annoyance, the seventh book in the series wasn’t translated into English, though people tell me it wasn’t as great as the first six.

Leviathan Wakes

by James S.A. Corey

This one’s just out — Corey is a pseudonym for Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. It’s kind of an old-fashioned space odyssey with aliens, zombies and space battleships, but it’s one of the best science-fiction books of the last year. They’re doing a sequel.