James Rollins's Reading List

"The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin, for pleasure."

"I begrudgingly read The Shipping News, which even to this day is the novel on my bookshelf with the most highlighted passages. Proulx's versatile use of language and sentence structure undid some blockage in my head. I attribute reading that book to freeing something inside my brain that allowed me to become a published writer."

"The one book that still haunts me to this day is his novel set in India, titled Song of Kali. It is brilliantly told, and so disturbing, it should come wrapped with a warning to think twice before opening."

"Most of my favorite stories back then dealt with animals, from Anna Sewell's Black Beauty to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes."

"Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank. A postapocalyptic tale of nuclear war and its very human cost."