I read a wide and bizarre collection of books for “The Gene,” including comics from the 1950s that fantasized about future human mutants, and a popular genre from the 1930s — I guess we might call it Eugenics Lite — that advocated the measurement and breeding of the best babies (blue-eyed, white) to improve the national gene pool. Perhaps the most interesting was Eugen Bleuler’s first case description of schizophrenia from 1911 that reads like the most incredible novel.

For “Emperor of All Maladies,” the one book that I particularly scoured for inspiration was Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” — an epic account of the Manhattan Project. I cannot think of another book that makes scientific history more riveting.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

My secret love is poetry — Kay Ryan, Ben Lerner, James Merrill, Vikram Seth. I’m not sure I avoid any particular genre, but political memoirs can stretch me thin.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

There’s no formula. There’s a moment in McEwan’s “Enduring Love” in which a middle-aged science writer on a picnic, about to pop open a bottle of Chablis (or something similar), witnesses a child in mortal danger and sprints to rescue the child — a decision that we later learn will pitch the writer into a vortex of delusion and danger. He writes: “What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness.” Stories are like that: They can move you by moving you — by forcing you to race into their labyrinths, without caution. When you read a story like that, you are actually pitched into something that is unavoidable — moved.

What’s the last book that made you cry?

Several of Lydia Davis’s short stories in her collection. And Alice Munro — out of envy — for the pitch-perfect economy of every word, every sentence.

The last book that made you laugh?

Several of Lydia Davis’s short stories in her collection. And I told you already: Zadie’s essays, at the end of which I do a little of both. Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” — which also made me cry; I seem to have a habit of conjoining these things. And Gary Shteyngart’s “Absurdistan.” That terminally annoying guy who sits with his nose in a book and smirks through a flight? I was that guy.

The last book that made you furious?

Furious — as in angry about the way the world is? Philip Gourevitch’s spellbindingly beautiful “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” and Kate Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”