Nicholson Baker's Reading List

"Last night my hand landed on John Toland's "Infamy," about Pearl Harbor, and I read 50 pages — it's tremendous in a certain way."

"I've been carrying around the galleys of Katie Roiphe's "In Praise of Messy Lives." Roiphe's willing to say risky things, and she has a prosey astringency that makes me happy."

"Recently I listened to Graham Greene's "The Human Factor," read by Tim Pigott-Smith. It's a little repetitive here and there, especially at the beginning, but honestly, it's an extraordinary, careful novel that works up to something true and sad and worth spending time with."

"I also liked Greene's autobiography, "A Sort of Life.""

"I go back to the poetry collections I read in my 20s — Stanley Kunitz's "Collected Poems," Howard Moss's "Selected Poems.""

"I go back to the poetry collections I read in my 20s — Stanley Kunitz's "Collected Poems," Howard Moss's "Selected Poems.""

"I cried reading Mary Berg's diary of hunger in the ghetto in Warsaw."

"I've got Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" on Eucalyptus, a nice simple app for the iPhone. The animated page-turns are better than the page-turns in iBooks! Twain's a genius, no question."

"Read his "War Prayer," too. It isn't funny — it'll make you mad."

"Although I have liked listening to "Fanny Hill." You can hear a marvelous free audio rendition of "Fanny Hill" on LibriVox.org."

"Tintin is my favorite children's book hero, or maybe it's Captain Haddock. Tintin was willing to walk around on the bottom of the sea, trusting the two detectives to crank his air pump. Nobody can draw Tibetan mountainsides like Hergé."

"In fourth grade, I read Robert Sheckley's "Shards of Space." I loved the title, and Sheckley made me want to write short stories about far-off vacuum-packed futures."

"In seventh grade, my English teacher told me to read a poetry collection called "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle." There's a poem in there about a burro sent by express that ends, "Say who you are and where you're going.""

"A woman there, a poet, once suggested that I read Mary Oliver's collected poems."