T.C. Boyle is coming to LIVE from the NYPL on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m. to discuss science, society, sex, and survival — the themes that drive his latest work. Get tickets now!

As part of our “Ask the Author” series, we asked five questions about his own life and times as a reader.

1. What was your all-time favorite book as a child?

I remember, just before starting kindergarten, that I found Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a bit dry (of course, I was reading it in the original German), so my mother gave me Winnie-the-Pooh, which I much preferred, not only in terms of story and movement, but its philosophical heft too. Sometime after that came Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which was mesmerizing, especially in its ultimate heroic revenge story, “Rikki Tikki Tavi.”

Here’s the epigraph:

At the hole where he went in
Red-eye called to Wrinkle-Skin,
‘Hear what little Red-eye saith: Nag, come up and dance with death.’

2. What’s your secret favorite of your OWN books and why?

Water Music. Because it’s my first and wildest novel, the one that allowed my brain to open out and open out again. Most first novelists mine autobiographical material: I didn’t. I set the book, which is a kind of twisted Tom Jones sort of tale with some heavy post-modern winking, in England and Africa in the period 1795-1805. However, this is no secret. Because I’ve been asked this question so often, I had to make a determination long ago, though I love all my titles with the kind of love only a parent can feel for his offspring.

3. Name one author who doesn’t get enough attention (and why s/he deserves more).

Dana Spiotta. Her Stone Arabia is one of the most brilliant novels I’ve read in the past decade. I’ll toss Bonnie Nadzam in here too — Lamb is a powerful and devastating book that manages the near-impossible: making a child-abductor human.

4. What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

Kent Haruf’s final novel, the spare and beautiful Our Souls at Night.

5. What books are you currently reading and what’s up next?

I am deep into a suite of books about a moment in recent American history. However, I cannot yet reveal their titles because it would give away the subject my next novel, which exists now only in the note-taking stage. What else? Looking forward to sinking my mind’s teeth into David Grann’s The Lost City of Z and Lionel Shriver’s new novel, The Mandibles.

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