I strongly endorse the idea of going beyond the verbal art forms traditionally marked as literature, says the mathematician, whose new book is Shape. But everybody already knows about Bob Dylan. They should have given it to Lynda Barry.

What books are on your night stand?

J. Robert Lennons great new novel, Subdivision, which I just finished, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynums new collection, Likes, which I just started. Judea Pearls Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, because I was going to write about causality and the geometry of networks in Shape, but I ran out of room. Josh Levins The Queen, a feat of reporting somewhere between true crime and political history. Moacyr Scliars The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, a high school favorite I was thinking Id reread. Trollopes He Knew He Was Right, which I just did reread. Pynchons Mason & Dixon, which I have started many times. Every year I pick a reading theme, and my plan was for this to be the year of reading long books. But its gone slowly; also on my table is Ford Madox Fords four-part novel Parades End, but Im bogged down in its high modernist style, halfway through Book 2. The night stand is not that big, so this pile is higher than it should be; also about as high as it usually is.

Whats the last great book you read?

The Lying Lives of Adults, by Elena Ferrante. People are kind of down on The Novel these days; Ferrante reminds you that the traditional virtues were taught to expect from novels (characters you experience as actual other people, a sense that something real is at stake) are not exhausted they still work! As long as the book is great.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

Vanity Fair, a couple of years ago, but I wish I hadnt been reading a novel whose main character was named Becky Sharp during the height of Baby Shark.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Lying on the couch with knees slung over the edge, print book.

Whats your favorite book no one else has heard of?

People know David Plotz but I think not so much his amazing book The Genius Factory, in which he uncovers the hidden history (and complicated afterstory) of the so-called Nobel sperm bank. The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids is a strange and angry kids book by Stanley Kiesel, a teacher. I loved it as a kid. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubanis I Do Not Come to You by Chance is a very funny and very timely novel about truth and lies and the internet; I think it has a lot of readers in other countries but not so many in the United States.

Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most?

As someone who writes nonfiction about topics many people dont know they care about, I idolize Janet Malcolm. Her sentences are so perfectly measured; each one is like a little argument. Except the ones that are like little knives. Her essay Forty-One False Starts (about a contemporary painter I didnt know I cared about) is a better explanation of how to write than any book I know that actually sets out to explain how to write.

Among novelists, the ones who do the things I would have liked to do as a writer are Ferrante, Zadie Smith, Peter Carey. Writers who really take a swing. I loved Elif Batumans The Idiot, and not only because it has very funny math scenes in it.

Internet writing including tweeting! is its own genre developing its own masters. Elisa Gabbert is a genius of Twitter (and also writes really good essays and poems that appear on paper as in days of old). Tom Scocca, too. His Towels are too thick now is what I showed my 15-year-old to explain how a short essay is supposed to work.

Svetlana Alexievich I like a lot, if you can say like about someone whose books darken your day so much. I learned about her only because of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize has its critics but actually is the most reliable way I know to find great writers youd otherwise never encounter. Halldor Laxness, I mean, who knew? Giving a Nobel to Bob Dylan was controversial, I know. I strongly endorse the idea of going beyond the verbal art forms traditionally marked as literature but everybody already knows about Bob Dylan. They should have given it to Lynda Barry.

Who writes especially well about math for a general audience?

Steve Strogatz is wonderful, writing about the deepest and most abstract ideas people have worked out in a way thats unfailingly humane; thats not easy. For the latest research developments, Erica Klarreich consistently has great stuff in Quanta. Amir Alexander is the best on the way math history intertwines with regular history. Cathy ONeils Weapons of Math Destruction and Meredith Broussards Artificial Unintelligence are critical documents of the ways mathematical methodology can be pressed into the service of ideological goals. And of course Martin Gardner is eternal; every generation of math-loving kids discovers his playfully profound books and learns from them.

Whats the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

From Surrender on Demand, a World War II memoir by the American secret agent/literary figure Varian Fry, I learned about the strange unsettled conditions of southern France in 1940, kind of occupied by Germany, kind of not.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

Funny jokes and authentic, hopeless sadness.

How do you organize your books? Geometrically?

No overall scheme but there are contiguous shelf chunks: popular math books, technical math books, books by Stephen Dixon, baseball books, books with America in the title, books about artificial languages, books about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, books by or about Edith Wharton, books by or about midcentury American Jews. A fair number of my books are packed away in boxes. During the pandemic I opened some that had been sealed for 15 years; Im sure every organization manual would say if I can do without a book for 15 years it should be gotten rid of, but it was a special joy to reunite with the old friends. Not that I recommend this as an organization strategy.

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

Indiscriminate. I read dozens of books a month. A lot of science fiction and science, at first. I read dozens of Isaac Asimov books (in both genres). What made me understand that a book could lift a cover off the world and show you how strange things were, especially normal things, were the novels of Daniel Pinkwater, especially Lizard Music. I first wanted to become a writer to spread the gospel of Lizard Music as I understood it.

I read a lot of books about mathematics as a kid, but the two that made the biggest impressions on me were Douglas Hofstadters Gödel, Escher, Bach and The Bill James Baseball Abstract, 1982,, probably because neither one billed itself as a book about mathematics.

As a teenager I developed ideas about Literature. My beloved English teacher Adrienne Marek, who died last year, gave me a copy of The Handmaids Tale to read and write about in lieu of our final exam, which I was missing in order to attend a math contest of some kind. I became obsessed and read all of Atwoods 1970s novels, none of which I really understood, but I could feel that something was going on.

Whats the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

I got my son CJ, whos in ninth-grade American history, to read Big Trouble, by J. Anthony Lukas, mainly so that I could read it in tandem with him and finally finish it. Its the entire history of the United States from the Civil War through the turn of the 20th century tied together through the story of the assassination by dynamite of a former governor of Idaho in 1905. When I took history as a kid, you never learned about any of this; they went through the Whiskey Rebellion in really fine-grained detail, they did Jackson and the Civil War, Lincoln gets killed, then suddenly it was May and there was still 150 years left to go and it was OK, there was World War I, we won, then they had World War II, we won again, have a great summer.

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

Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott. I learned a lot from it about the notion of legibility, the way governments create formal structures that allow them to make sense of the messy world of people, then systematically mistake those formal structures for the actual world. The book teaches epistemic humility, which is a good thing for a government leader to have. In Shape I wrote a lot about gerrymandering, which really confronts you with the fact that who sits in the legislature is not such a great formal proxy for what the people want. Especially when the people in power dont want it to be.

Youre organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Not Janet Malcolm the idea of being observed by her pitiless gaze is too terrifying.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

The only books Im embarrassed not to have read are books by my friends, which I wont name, because my friends dont know I havent read their books yet.

What do you plan to read next?

I have a to-read shelf for this. Right now this includes Mathematics for Human Flourishing, by Francis Su, We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry, The Ideas That Made America, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. But I rarely end up reading next exactly what I plan to read next.