I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut.
A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.
Fantasy has a better chance of lasting than a lot of other things. The Hobbit and the Narnia books, they seem to get handed down father to son, mother to daughter. Because they're set in a fantasy world, they can remain relevant.
'Watchmen' is not only the greatest comic ever written, it's a really important work of fiction.
P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.
The space genre is timeless.
My favorite classic novel may be 'The Invisible Man.' It's smart and genuinely funny. Otherwise, my favorite character is probably Frankenstein's Monster/Frankenstein the Monster.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.
My favourite books series as a young child was the Frank L. Baum 'Wizard of Oz' series. They were beautifully written, oversized fat books with wonderful type and illustrations.
It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.
I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl.
My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.
