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

The genres I most enjoy reading are the ones I try and avoid, because I love them too much. As a child and teenager, those beloved genres were comic books, science fiction, fantasy and war stories, both fiction and nonfiction. As an adult, I added crime stories. The problem is that if I pick up a crime thriller by Jo Nesbo, Walter Mosley or Don Winslow, or a science fiction novel by Octavia Butler, I’ll be up until the early hours of the morning to finish it, and I don’t have the time. That’s likewise the case with comic books when I give in to them, whether they are by the Hernandez brothers, Alan Moore, Rumiko Takahashi, Osamu Tezuka, Adrian Tomine, Gene Luen Yang, or many others.

Besides the fact that these genres provide gripping storytelling, I also love them because they oftentimes have more to tell us about our larger contemporary world than so-called literary fiction (which doesn’t acknowledge that it’s a genre as well). Comic books long ago predicted presidents like Donald Trump, in series like Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’s “Give Me Liberty.” Crime fiction, which often connects low-level crime to high-level corruption, can help us understand the operations and effects of a Trump presidency that unabashedly favors strongmen of all kinds. Science fiction likewise often speculates on grand political questions. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars,” for example, is about the colonization of that planet and the ensuing tragedy wrought by human politics, greed and ambition. It takes place in the future but is really about our eternal human strengths and weaknesses. I like it when literature gets political, and contemporary literary fiction is more often apolitical than not.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously?

I love paper books, but traveling with them was a pain, because my luggage could only accommodate so many books. When the Kindle came along it solved that problem of portability and was my favored reading mode for several years. Then I published my novel and rediscovered the fetish of the physical object. I wanted to hold my book and enjoyed seeing it on bookstore shelves, and have returned to the thrill of buying and reading paper books. I still read on the Kindle, however, and also listen to books on audio. It doesn’t matter how I’m reading as long as I’m reading. I read several books at a time, which mirrors to some extent how I always have more than one writing project that I work on simultaneously.

How do you organize your books?

Organize?

What’s your favorite book to assign to and discuss with your students?

Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” I find the book endlessly rewarding to teach, because it’s so rich and layered and still relevant to the lives of students. In addition, it’s a powerful book about the necessity and dangers of storytelling. The first line is “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you,’” and the rest of the book is about the author telling everyone what her mother said. Telling what must not be told is one of the writer’s primary tasks. It is also a difficult and dangerous one.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was a lonely boy and a voracious reader who treated the library as my second home. I loved Curious George and Tintin, although I see their problems now as an adult who’s more sensitive to racial and colonial connotations. I wouldn’t want to reread the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift or “Tom Brown’s School Days,” but I liked them as a child. Other favorites that I have not revisited for fear of spoiling their memory are Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”; “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths”; Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”; Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot books; Frank Herbert’s “Dune”; early Robert Heinlein novels; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”; Audie Murphy’s “To Hell and Back”; Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia; and many, many superhero and war comic books. A curious child can read whatever he or she wants in a good library, which has no borders and stands up for the First Amendment. That meant that by the time I was 13 or 14, I had access to lots of war books filled with sex and violence, as well as trashy, soft-core porn paperbacks featuring detectives, medieval knights and hit men. This probably goes a long way toward explaining how I became the writer that I am.

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

For President Obama, the Bible (the Old Testament, not the New). For President Trump, the Bible (the New Testament, not the Old).