What was the last book to make you laugh?

Simon Rich’s “Spoiled Brats.” Especially the novella “Sell Out.” Just lovingly nails everything repellent and beautiful about millennials. Before that, “The Timewaster Letters,” by Robert Popper. This one is sneaky — it’s a collection of funny, weird letters that Popper sent out to various businesses in the U.K., collecting their responses. You’ve seen that before, haven’t you? “The Lazlo Letters” and the Ted L. Nancy letters. Except those are pale, pale comparisons to the pee-your-pants hilarity of what Robert Popper does in “The Timewaster Letters.” I read it on a plane, and it was one of the few books I ever had put down and read later in private, I was laughing so hard. That hadn’t happened since The Onion’s “Our Dumb Century.”

The last book that made you cry?

Nothing has ever laid me out like the moment in “Huckleberry Finn” where Huck says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Pure heroism and friendship. It’s so rare to see that in real life that that sentence is, technically, science fiction.

The last book that made you furious?

“____ Magnet,” by Jim Goad. It’s his written-in-prison memoir about being railroaded, first for “obscenity” and then for domestic abuse. I was furious at him, then the law enforcement system, and then at the nascent politically correct movement and, finally, the Oregon penal system. It’s a hard-to-get-through roar of rage, but it’ll leave you with a tingly, wrung-out feeling that a lot of other criminal memoirs can only dream of.

What’s the worst book you’ve ever read?

I hate to say it, but “Jaws” is just awful. Highest example of adaptation from page to film improving a work. Ugh. The whole Hooper and Brody’s wife affair. And that shoulder shrug of an ending. The shark just gets tired? Snore.

What kind of reader were you as a child? What were your favorite childhood books?

The “Great Brain” books, because they felt like a weird window to a much earlier time in America that was still populated by personalities I recognized in my everyday life. And the John Bellairs books, which were so quietly logical in their approach to magic that there were times I felt like magic might be another vocation I could learn though repetition. And, from age 10 on, Stephen King, Stephen King, Stephen King. People and personalities I recognized from my life right now, also living in the world I lived in right now, battling monsters. Bliss.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Garret Keizer’s “The Enigma of Anger.” A meditation and history on rage, both righteous and unrighteous, which seems to be infecting so much of world events these days, both the high (politics, statesmanship) and the low (pop culture, social media). We haven’t seen the first truly great leader of the 21st century, but he or she is going to have to address, remedy and control rage. It’s the hidden poison of our tight-wire planet.

If you could require every American to read one book, what would it be?

“The Elements of Style.” Ugh, the typos I see, everywhere. The clunky syntax from supposedly smart people. Make my headaches go away, Strunk and White!