What book should nobody read until the age of 40?

I don’t know. If I did, I might well avoid it!

You’ve talked about how often science fiction writers get the future wrong. Are there any you think get it particularly right, or at least close?

“Random Acts of Senseless Violence,” by Jack Womack. Published in 1994, it’s come to mirror our present dystopia in some extraordinary way, I assume by working from fundamentally dysfunctional aspects of our basic primate hardwiring. Written, as it were, not so much with Orwell in mind as Hannah Arendt.

“The Alteration,” by Kingsley Amis. Alternate history, in my opinion, is a more demanding game than imagining the future (if only because conventional historical fiction, like history, is itself highly speculative). Amis rolls the dice hard here, positing the result of the pope having successfully made Martin Luther an offer that prevents the Reformation. A masterpiece of its kind.

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

When I’m writing fiction, reading fiction rules itself out. Anything that isn’t wonderful seems less interesting than whatever I’m writing, and anything that’s wonderful makes whatever I’m writing seem hopelessly shabby by comparison, triggering impostor syndrome. (After a certain point in one’s career, the worry that they’ll finally notice your true absence of talent morphs into worrying that they’ll finally notice that you’ve Lost It.) It increasingly feels to me, as I get older, that reading and writing occupy the same limited territory in my mind, and I deeply envy those for whom this evidently isn’t a problem.

None of the above seems, mercifully, to apply to nonfiction.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

“Personal Effects,” by Hiroshi Fujiwara. A catalog of 100 personal possessions of Fujiwara’s, each accompanied by his brief explanation of why he likes it. These range from the specific brand of rubber bands he uses in lieu of a wallet to a Hermes guitar case given him by Eric Clapton. I love this, in part because no culture other than Japan can offer the equivalent of Fujiwara, who’s more a cool-hunter than a designer — not that “cool-hunter” really seems to do him justice. (If he’s that, somehow, nobody else really is.) I’ve avoided learning whether the “’09” on the book’s cover indicates that there were an annual series of these, else I have to find and buy them all.