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. Both those novels are capital-g Great. 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.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

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.

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.”)

Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?

The weather. It’s underrated.

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 book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I have a large collection of books about conjoined twins. I used to be the conjoined twins reviewer for Booklist Magazine, which is a busier reviewing beat than one might expect. My favorite novels about conjoined twins (or formerly conjoined twins) are “Sister Mine,” by Nalo Hopkinson, and “God’s Fool,” by Mark Slouka.

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.”