Books by authors from Dr. Seuss to Robert Penn Warren.

Question: What are your favorite books?

Charles Bock: Well. Number one on what influenced my work is The Ring of Brightest Angles Around Heaven; that’s number one.

Number two is a little novel called The Stepford Wives, by whoever wrote that.

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat is a great seminal piece of thinking and writing. A lot of the books I named are really high on my list.

I had a face with Truman Capote, where I just loved his very early in my writing life or I was just in love with some of the beautiful paragraphs and sentences he wrote and I still think In Cold Blood is a great, great book.

Fitzgerald and I love Gatsby and the longer one, the one that took him 10 years. Tender Is the Night breaks my heart. One of those book that I almost can’t pick up again, because I don’t want to put myself through how hard, how touching and heart breaking the ending of that it is.

Robert Penn Warren’s, All the King’s Men. I just love that book so much. In fact I ripped some of the lyrical nature of, some of those paragraphs I gave to Ponyboy and instead of driving through Weezyana heat, I have Ponyboy riding his bike through the Las Vegas streets. And there is a couple of paragraphs in there that are direct, okay writing God’s Robert Penn Warren wherever you are, this is my salute to you.

Those, I think are some of the real, real landmarks. And there is many, many more and I am sure for hours I will be replying this question in my head. That’s a good one.